Hello! I'm writing to you from the Honolulu airport where I am waiting for my flight to Guam. I'll have a partially free day in Guam on Friday to adjust recover from the trip and to see some of the island before we start loading up the ship on Saturday. We'll have two days of prep on Saturday and Sunday (called "mobilization" or "mob" for short) before setting sail on the Exploration Vessel (EV) Nautilus on Monday, June 2nd at (I think) 8am local time. Guam is 15 hours ahead of US Eastern Time and is across the international date line, so I've included a clock on the home page to make it easier to follow my updates.
On the ship, my main job will be collecting and processing eDNA samples for my lab, which I'll make a separate post explaining for anyone who is curious. Another, more public-facing role I'll play on the ship is participant in the Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) livestreams. When the ROV is diving underwater, I'll have shifts in the control room where we will be looking at the camera and data feeds from the vehicle, driving it around, and directing it to collect samples. That camera feed along with audio from the control room with be livestreamed on the NautilusLive website/youtube. I thought it could be fun to post my shift schedule here so that people can tune in and listen to me chat! At other times, I may also be a part of launching and recovering the ROV over the side of the boat, and I'll for sure be spending a lot of time in the wet lab and on the working deck, so if you check the various live streams, there's a fair chance you'll spot me somewhere! Links to the NautilusLive webpage are in the sidebar and the footer of hopefully all of the relevant pages on this site.
Once I set sail, I probably won't have cell signal, so the best ways to contact me will be either by email or Whatsapp. I am working on getting a comments section set up for this site, but haven't got it running quite yet. Hopefully in the future it will be below my posts!
