UPDATE: 18 May 2010

Hello all,

It’s our third day at sea, but we’ve still got a day and a half until we reach our study area. Once we get there we can start taking data that we can actually use. Almost there…

The past couple of days have basically been a test run to let people get used to their weird sleep schedules (looking at you, 12 – 4 watch!) and work out any bugs in the equipment.Turns out, it's pretty good we've had this buffer time because we've needed it to get some technical kinks worked out. We've also been learning how to do some things around the ship and today some of the science crew helped bring in the magnetometer. Pretty cool.

Today we traveled about 470 kilometers (300 miles) despite having to deviate off course a little bit to avoid a fishing vessel. That puts us about 700 kilometers (440 miles) from the coast and any nearest land. It's kind of crazy looking around and seeing nothing but water. So far we haven’t seen too many exciting features as we’ve been testing out the equipment for mapping the ocean floor, but we’ve been really excited for the four or five seamounts that we’ve encountered.

So, to let you guys get an idea of what we're up to and what being on the ship is like, we're going to start running some features. We'll start out pretty straight-forward, but I'm sure they'll get a little more out there as cabin fever starts to set in.

So...first up, we'll introduce you to some spaces on the ship. Today we've got...[drum roll]

The Main Science Lab: http://galapagos-expedition.blogspot.com/p/ship-rooms.html