Sleep is a luxury at sea.  You don’t want to miss anything so you better stay awake.  We’re heading towards some new stations to the North of ground zero and will be doing a hexagonal grid around ground zero tonight in search of additional plumes.

Lesson number 1: Never report that things are going smoothly at sea.

Today we saw some new things around the area. A fleet of skimmer ships was doing a surface burn to reduce the size of an oil slick. We were a couple of miles away from the burn but the large cloud of black smoke caught everyone’s eye. I’m still amazed by the ‘city of ships’ around the spill site. The rigs drilling the relief wells and the ‘siphon’ ship (large ship to the left in photo), as well as many support vessels are visible in this shot.

Earlier today, we sent the CTD down at a site where two CDOM rich layers were documented during the Pelican cruise.  We did three casts and unfortunately, saw only very weak signals and had nothing to get excited about.  Around 3PM, we discussed the possibility that the plume had moved, which we all found interesting.

The Walton Smith departed Gulfport at 8PM on May 25.  The science party consists of microbiologists, geologists and biogeochemists from the University of Georgia, the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), the University of California (Santa Barbara) and the University of Southern Mississippi and Justin Gillis, a journalist.