SNQ (18.34,147.23)

The Trophy

America has Sunday Night Football, the R/V Kilo Moana has Sunday Night Quoits. The championship game to be exact - this one is for all of the marbles folks. Last night was the semi-final matches and almost the whole crew was packed in the quoit arena. The music was load and the energy was high. The only thing missing was beer and a hot dog. The last of the science teams was defeated and tonight the championship game was between the chef (reigning champ) and kitchen assistant 1 vs. kitchen assistant 2 and one of the science lab tech guys. Needless to say, the kitchen was full of trash talking and excitement today. You could cut the tension with a knife (the same knife, in fact, that I used to cut my grilled cheese sandwich). The trash talking reached a whole new level when a victory cake proclaiming "2010 Quoits Champs" with the chef's team's names on it was set out at dinner, 2 hours before the match. Who knew such a low blow could come from white and blue frosting and rainbow sprinkles. By the end of dinner, the cake had been defaced, saying "2010 Quoits Chumps". Things were getting dirty. As 7:00 pm rolled around, the stadium was bursting at the seams and the stereo base was loud and low. In the end, the cake did not lie, and the chef was named champion, again.

The stadium was packed.

The winning double ringer.

The champs blinded by the flashing bulbs of the paparazzi.

On the other battle front, the scientific data damages has been analyzed and the final count is this: of the 12 OBSes recovered, 8 recorded data and only 4 of those 8 had the full years worth of data. So that means 4 of 16 OBSes functioned properly. Not good. Granted we were setting records for depth deploying these instruments in the locations we were, but we had hoped for a far better success rate. Without having the complete arrays of data, we will not be able to answer the questions we set out to. However, after looking at the data, there are some interesting and unexpected wave phases that were recorded, which could lead to answering other questions. So hopefully in the end, this mission will be able to make some forward progress to characterizing structure of the upper 400 km of the Earth. We will have to wait and see.

We have one more full day on the ship. That means I only have to wake up at 4 am one more time for my watch. Hooray! We get to celebrate Monday night, our last night on the ship, with a BBQ on the upper deck. Then Tina and I plan to spend as much of Tuesday as we can soaking up land on the beaches of Guam.