My dearest Anais,

We are off...away from the dock, under the Seattle bridges, most of which are low drawbridges and had to open to let us pass, gliding by boats and ships of every imaginable shape and size, through the locks that transported us from fresh to salt water, into Puget Sound, and on our way. We are on the Thompson, a large and beautiful ship, exactly like the Atlantis, the ship we used last year, in all but a few details. We departed late yesterday -- originally we were to leave at 8 o'clock in the morning, then noon, then six at night, and finally 8:00 p.m.--because of a problem with ROPOS, our underwater robot, but no matter, we are gone.

Basket of 8,000 feet of coiled line. On the top of the basket are floats that will bring the line to the surface after the basket is on the bottom. The torpedo-like contraption on the front is an acoustic release that frees the floats from the basket. The ship sends an acoustic signal down to the mechanism, telling it to release. Vancouver Island is in the background.

This morning I awoke to find us in the middle of the Straits of Juan de Fuca, in the bright sunshine. (Ask Maman to show this to you on a map.) The Olympic Mountains are to the south of us, their peaks rising above a cloud layer that remains just over the mountains. To our north is Vancouver Island, low and hilly with heavy clouds hanging above it. We are past Port Angeles, a town on the Olympic Peninsula. On either shore now, there are no villages or other signs of people, except for the forest clearcuts, of course. In fact, this little corner of the world has very few people. There are several ships in the distance. We were following one large oil tanker for a while, but it was going faster and disappeared slowly in the distance. There is a system of traffic control for the ships in the Straits. First of all there are two shipping lanes, like lanes on a road, except they are a mile or so wide. Ships going in one direction are in one lane and those going in the opposite direction are in another lane. And then there is a lane between them where no ships are supposed to go. Also, all the big ships have to be in communication with someone who monitors the traffic and makes sure all the ships know where the others are.

We have something new on the Thompson that we did not have on the Atlantis, namely the ability to see the weather almost immediately. Basically, if there is a weather satellite overhead, we can pick up the signal from it. The satellite is a sort of eye in the sky. It looks down and sees the clouds, and it transmits a signal describing exactly what it sees-not in words, of course, but in language that a computer can understand. We have a computer on the ship that listens to the satellite signal and, voila(!), turns the signal into a map showing where the clouds are. There is only one wee problem -- this only works if there happens to be a satellite nearby -- if the satellite happens to be on the other side of the Earth it is hardly going to see you, right? The satellites go around the Earth, so sooner or later one will come by. The computer on the ship knows exactly where the weather satellites are and when they'll be in the right position. For example, this morning it said that one weather satellite was near the equator in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and another was over northern Russia. Those satellites cannot see the weather here, so we have to wait until they are in the right position.

Engineers preparing Ropos for a test dive in the Juan de Fuca Strait.

There are all sorts of strange things on the deck of the ship. I won't describe all of these things right now, except for the basket of line, a picture of which should be on the web site. The basket contains the line that we are going to use to pull the samples to the surface-all 8,000 feet of it. Do you know how long that is? Well, it would stretch from our house to your school! And that 8,000 feet of line weighs something like a thousand pounds. It can hold 62,000 pounds, which means that you could lift about 20 cars like ours with it, or more than a 1,000 of little you's. I don't know if you can see it, but the line is carefully laid out in the basket, and each and every length is tied to the side of the basket. This is so that when the end of the line is floated to the surface it does not get tangled up with itself. The floats are the big yellow balls on top of the basket. They are filled with air, and thus when released from the basket they rise to the surface and bring the end of the line with them. The yellow balls are released by the gray cylinder gizmo attached to the side of the basket. This is called an acoustic release. What happens is that the ship makes a series of sounds, like the beeps on the telephone. In fact, the sounds are basically the telephone number of acoustic release and they command it to let go. Okay? I hope that makes sense.

Anyway, perhaps you noticed that there is not only a lot of line but also a lot of ties holding all that line in the basket just so. It took 14 hours to put that 8,000 feet of line in the basket!! My colleague, Le Olson, who figured all this stuff out, told me that he got his wife and daughter to help load one basket. Lucky you're not here, kiddo -- you might find yourself loading line in basket (and we do not allow complaints out here!).

That's it for today. As I am tapping away on my computer I am wondering how you are and where you are. Wherever that might be I hope you are having fun.

Love,
Your Father
(Ed Mathez)