Today we left port and started steaming towards our next dredge location.  We are cowboy dredging now, without any pingers.  This means that we are flying blindly above the bottom, and we have to be more cautious about how we maneuver the ship.  This dredge came up with many more rocks and overwhelmingly more mud than usual.  It took us the better part of an hour to clean up just the muck and crap alone.

The rocks we got were mostly "manganese encrusted sediment".  Sediment is mud, sometimes compressed over the years.  Manganese is an element that comes out of the ocean water and sticks to almost anything in the ocean.  These rocks look like mud that rock has grown on top of, because manganese looks like volcanic rock to untrained eyes like mine.  The difference is important, though, because we have barely a passing interest in the mud, and are focusing almost entirely on the volcanic rock.

Identifying these rocks is crucial to our study, and is quite time consuming.  When we're waiting for the next dredge to come up, we catalogue and archive the rocks form the most recent dredge.  First, we see if it's a rock we want, if not, overboard it goes: back with the rest of 'em.  Of course, we would never toss over a rock that might interfere with what we're out here to do: prove our hypothesis.  That's the way of science (only joking!).  We toss over mostly mud and small pebbles, and (painfully for us lowlives) keep the rest for further analysis.  Then we look closely at the rock, and write down its characteristics.  Then we bag 'em and put them in a storage locker, like so many bodies...

The only hijinx in the system is the drain in the corner of the room, which is a direct link to the boat's sewage system.  It smells terrible, and today we finally covered it up, with about 10 plastic bags and a roll of duct tape.  It was made particularly difficult as a result of the massive positive pressure behind the drain: it was practically impossible to make it stop belching wet stink.  Finally, though, we managed to get it.  Hah.  Team: 1, Evil Stinky Drain: 0.

Daniel Staudigel onboard the R/V Kilo Moana.