13 January 2006
Guest Blog from Susan Adkins

Greetings from the Tommy Thompson and the Galapagos. My daughter, Blakeley, and I joined the ship yesterday at Porto Ayora on the island of Santa Cruz. We are currently underway southwest of the largest of the islands, Isabela.

On board are four Oceanography professors (Mark Holmes, Seelye Martin, Gabrielle Rocap, and Roy Carpenter) and nine undergraduates.. The students are doing the science for the research projects they designed last quarter. They are on the Tommy for eight days until the next 10 students from the class take over their bunks for another week.

In addition to the UW faculty and students there are a dozen scientists from Ecuador who act as observers in addition to producing their own experiments using the ship’s equipment. We also have aboard a naturalist from the Galapagos for two on shore experiences, a PhD candidate from Oregon State University, a lab technician, a most popular and helpful TA from the Oceanography class, and twenty-one permanent crew members who operate the vessel, the technical equipment, and kitchen.

Any thought Blakeley and I had of feeling like outsiders disappeared within the first minutes on the ship. We have been assigned to two watches at 8 – 12 (AM and PM) where we assist with large equipment, act as lab techs for the students, haul boxes of supplies, etc. As ARCS observers we have been taking digital pictures to share with all aboard and the School of Oceanography, and assisting with a website for elementary and middle school students in Seattle (a project of Professor Rick Keil and a student aboard).

Projects began our first afternoon collecting water samples with the CTD (a packet of instruments which measure conductivity/salinity, temperature and depth among other data) and zooplankton, Arcartia (a minute crustacean) for Jonathan Herzog. In the middle of the night two other students, Pamela Maynard and Trina Lichtendorf, used the CTD again to observe bacteria and phytoplankton related to the iron supply waters south of Isabela. Proposals for all the students can be accessed though the web (http://courses.washington.edu/ocean443/443.shtml). The sophistication of the work of these undergraduates is remarkable, as is the cooperative efforts of the faculty and the Ecuadorian scientists.

We are enormously grateful to the University of Washington’s School of Oceanography for providing this extraordinary opportunity to us.

More to come…

Susan Adkins