Life aboard a ship at sea is dictated by unfamiliar parameters.
There are strictly adhered to boat deployments and dive times. Emails come and go twice a day. There's a dress code (no flip flops; no tank tops in the mess hall). And the most precisely planned and regimented things are meal times, by which everything else is planned. They are chiseled in stone.
With all of this under our belts, we tackle Day 2.
Curtis films the early morning (0630) plankton tow: a search for lionfish larvae, while Norb readies for the first dive of the morning (0730) - a survey of lionfish on one of the earlier identified research sites - along with a side by side comparison of HD (high definition) vs. SD (standard definition) footage; or as he puts it "jumping off a two-story building with 600 pounds of equipment."
Throughout the morning the wind picks up, to a rip roaring 25k. Great for sailing; not so for retrieving divers and dinghies. The afternoon dive is abandoned and instead R/V Nancy Foster undertakes more multi-beaming exercises, utilizing the state-of-the-art equipment upgraded this past winter.
Multi-beaming is a form of echolocation which uses a 'fan' of beams to map the ocean floor. Out here, Paula is looking for the kind of hard bottoms and structure the lionfish like to hang out on, for further studies. Everything we do is oriented toward finding out the most information possible about this fish: where it lives, what it eats, how it reproduces, whether it is thriving ... and tomorrow, we just may even find out how it tastes.
[Editor's note: Paula Whitfield is the NOAA mission's chief scientist; Curtis Callaway and Norbert Wu are EISF's high definition cinematographers]
Meanwhile, back in Beaufort at the NOAA Lab, Susan Sember and Bud Cross are coordinating logistics of the lionfish production, working on several other high definition documentary projects, including their Florida red tide film and writing several more grant proposals....
Somewhat disappointed that they were unable to go out to sea with the rest of their film production crew, Bud and Susan are rewarded, however, with an unanticipated "up close and personal" encounter with a lionfish. Just as Bud and Susan are exiting the Lab, a NOAA employee shouts, "We have a commercial fisherman out in the parking lot with a lionfish!"
Several go out to meet Milton Mathis, a long time North Carolina fisherman. This is actually the second lionfish he's caught. The first was last year. He brought that one to the Lab for reporting and examination by the NOAA scientists, as well. The lionfish he has with him today was caught hook and line using a cigar minnow as bait. It was caught six miles off of Cape Lookout at a depth of nine fathoms.
The NOAA scientists weigh Milton's catch. It's 2.66 pounds and 17 inches long. Milton tells Susan, "The lionfish I caught last year was forty miles offshore. This one was only six miles off the coast. They're getting closer, bigger and more abundant. I wish I had had a video camera when this one was alive swimming, she was a beauty!"
Just wait, Milton ... our underwater cinematographer, Norb Wu, will have lots of high definition video of the lionfish for you to see!
[Editor's note: Photo of R/V Nancy Foster aft deck by Curtis Callaway; photo of fisherman Milton's lionfish catch by Curtis Lewis, NOAA]