Day 1 Kilo Moana

This morning started bright and early! I was picked up at 6:30 am to head to the UH Marine Center. After I arrived, I unloaded my things to load them onto the ship. Wow!! The ship, Kilo Moana, is beautiful! I’ve never been on ship this huge before today. I feel like a little kid on Christmas morning. There is so much to see and learn!

After unloading the car, I checked-in on the ship. I then headed to my bunk. Before coming on this trip, I was a little nervous. I felt a little intimated. Everyone coming on this research vessel is familiar with the oceanography and/or zoology. Many people here are graduated students from University of Hawaii. I feel more comfortable now. We are all learning together.

My bunk roommate is Kelley. She works at the Waikiki Aquarium as the Aquarium Biologist. Kelley hopes to gather some jellyfish and other interesting fish during the research vessel expedition. Her plan is to take them back to the Waikiki Aquarium to gather information about them, and to keep them alive for future exhibits.

After leaving port, we had a meeting. The Captain went over all the safety procedures, and gave us information about the ship. Just to make sure we understood the safety procedures, we had a fire drill. During our fire drill, we had to gather our life jacket and a big orange bag. Then we headed to the meeting area, and put on the bright orange life jackets. When everyone had them on correctly, we were able to take them off. In the bag we brought with us, was an immersion suit.

We all had to climb into the suit successfully. I thought we all looked like the characters from the movie Monsters, Inc. Remember when the monster had a sock on his back, and the bright yellow suited monsters went to disinfect the socked monster? Well, that's what we looked like, but our suits were red. The purpose for the suit is to keep us warm. If, for some safety reason, we had to go overboard, the suit would help prevent hypothermia. Hypothermia happens when the body's temperature drops and people get extremely cold. This could happen if people were stranded in the water for too long.

The safety drill continued with a walk to the lifeboats. We listened carefully to the all the directions to make sure we would be prepared if we needed to use the lifeboats. This concluded our safety drill.



Before lunch, the respirometer was dropped into the ocean. The respirometer is a device that will measure the deep-sea fish metabolic rate. The design has four chambers. One chamber is used for the control. Our fingers are crossed that we have fish in the other three chambers when the respirometer resurfaces.

I have to sign off for now. I'm going to help gather water samples from different depths of the ocean.

=)