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MISSION SUMMARY - October 24, 2000. By @Sea Correspondent and Video Production Specialist - Brian Cousin 
The R/V EDWIN LINK is docked just inside the Fort Pierce Inlet. She'll make
the half-hour trip north to HARBOR BRANCH when the tide is high enough to navigate the intracoastal
waterway without bumping the bottom.
The journey back from the Bahamas didn't turn out to be as rough as everyone had expected, with seas reportedly running 16 to 18 feet in the Gulf Stream. Captain George Gunther chose the route for the transit back carefully: head north in the lee of the Bimini chain towards West End, Grand Bahama Island, and cut west at Memory Rock for the run across the stream towards Florida. That would limit our exposure to the waves and 35 to 40 knot winds to the minimum. Last evening as I stood on the bridge watching waves occasionally crash over the bow and rain against the windows, the sound of Coast Guard reports of vessels in distress crackled over the VHF radio on Channel 16. It was not a good time to be anywhere near the Gulf Stream in a pleasure craft. "Vessel hailing Coast Guard ... what is your position and the nature of your distress" . No reply. The request for information is repeated a number of times, and each time goes unanswered. It's possible that an electronic hailing device has inadvertently activated, or there may really be a boat and crew in distress. The thought of being in trouble far from land in the tumultuous waves, wind and the darkness was a grim one. |
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It's been a good cruise for the Biomedical Marine Research group, and the extra day of
operations on the Bahama Bank was a windfall, if you'll pardon the pun.
Dr. Shirley Pomponi, director of the division sums it up: "We needed two days in Bimini to make up for time we lost on a cruise in May. Since then we also came up with other experiments we needed to do. So we did everything we hoped to do on this cruise - the extra day was really valuable." The two days in Bimini were needed to collect more samples of a sponge with promising biological activity based on previous research in Pomponi's group. On three of the four dives, each sample bucket came up containing at least one sample of the sponge. Preliminary analysis aboard ship revealed some unexpected surprises, too. "We found more morphologies of the organism, and evidence of greater chemical diversity and richness than we knew before", said Shirley. "It's possible that we'll be able to identify more biologically active chemicals than we originally suspected were present in this sponge. In fact, it's possible that there may be two or more new species of the sponge than were known before!" 
She and her team now have a good supply of the sponge with which to search for and identify novel
compounds in the suite of BMR laboratories back at HARBOR BRANCH.
This was an important mission to accomplish in just 4 days. But it was done. Shirley continued, "It was a challenge to get all the work done. In the first two days, Susan Sennett and I spent nearly 80 hours dissociating sponge cells in preparation for the other experiments. Amy Wright and her team chemically analyzed dozens of samples, and Kathleen Janda and her team prepared over 500 microbial isolation plates. There were several different tasks going on at the same time, but our group really works together well as a team--we've been doing it this way for nearly 16 years! It was a very satisfying mission". 
At the dock we are met Dr. Pomponi's assistant, Janice McDuffie, who is bearing cups and something
to toast with. Shirley toasts her staff and associates. Someone toasts the R/V EDWIN LINK and her
crew. A cheer goes up. This is the last mission for many of the ship's crew, and for the
R/V EDWIN LINK by the name we now know her. Plans are to lay up the ship for one year, starting
at the end of October. When she returns to service, she'll be the R/V SEWARD JOHNSON II, named
in honor of HARBOR BRANCH Oceanographic Institution's Chairman, J. Seward Johnson, Jr.
To the captain and crew of the R/V EDWIN LINK, thanks and best wishes. To the crew of the Johnson Sea Link I, thanks for yet another successful deepwater mission. Thanks to everyone who let me take pictures, shoot video and ask questions about their work, and for their help reporting @Sea. DBMR crew: Dr. Shirley Pomponi, Dr. Amy Wright, Dr. Susan Sennett, John Reed, Kathleen Janda, Jane Thompson, Gail Samples, Penny Michaels, post doc Dr. Alan Duckworth, intern Shelly Cant and intern Rob Jelier. 
JSL I crew: Don Liberatore, Craig Caddigan, Ken O'Brien, Dan Boggess, Ben Chiong, Frank Lombardo.
R/V Edwin Link crew: Captain George Gunther, Matt Skelly, Dave Foote, Jamie Sizemore, Dave "cookie" Kervin, Kurt Hoyer, Steve Hyde (who was unable to make this cruise). Additional ship's crew. From the R/V Seward Johnson: Robbie Shakespeare, Stewart Moreaux. From the small boat marina: Jimmy Nelson. For @Sea: Mary Clark and Jon Saint at Harbor Branch, Dan Boggess aboard ship for providing images for daily upload. | ||