Home base for many of us on the ship is the Main Lab. It looks a lot like an old high school biology lab with wooden benches around the perimeter, metal cabinets above ( in various shades of faded school green), an occasional sink and safety station, and three large work tables down the center. Unlike most biology labs, though, there are also a slew of computers, a ping pong table, (sound mind, sound body!), portholes, and a serious shortage of stools. If you don't time it right, you lose the game of musical stools and end up like Uriah Heep or Bob Cratchit standing at your work station.

Three special tools waiting for a ride on ROPOS. From left to right: Flow Visualizer (placed on top of the sulfide structure to measure flow), Stainer (placed over tubeworms, stain provides a baseline for measuring future growth), Chimney Master (placed over chimney for collecting biotic specimens)

The space in the lab is allocated by institution and function. The REVEL program, AMNH, NOVA, and an espresso machine (remember this is a Seattle-based research team) are assigned perimeter placements. The center tables are allocated to macrofauna, microbiology, and the ROPOS gang. APL, the Applied Physics Lab of UW, the engineers who designed the recovery plan and attendant apparatus, occupies the spot closest to the door that leads to the fantail of the ship where all the gear (e.g., ROPOS and its winch, recovery cages, baskets with line, various transponders, transducers, and transceivers) is lashed to the deck, and where work on the ROV continues round the clock.

Ping Pong: an ancient sport, involving small paddles, plastic hollow balls, and egos, adapted for use in research laboratories and on ocean-going vessels

At this stage of the cruise, the lab serves as a staging area for many activities. People are fabricating and rigging their equipment and preparing for the dives (e.g., sewing cylinders of cloth to serve as filters for collection, splicing lines to weights and floats, charging batteries for betacams, creating new cables for the ROV). The apparatus for collecting biota and samples look like R2D2s country cousins. Photographs of the site and the sulfide structures from last year's cruise are being assembled into mosaic images that can serve as supplements to the sonar-constructed maps and as visual references for the pilots, scientists, and engineers as they maneuver around the axial valley and the sulfide structures. The three websites (AMNH, REVEL, NOVA), writing dispatches, logging and editing digital photos, and bundling them for transmission, have become a major cottage industry. And finally, there is the checking of e-mail accounts on the ships network, looking for those eagerly awaited messages from home. A white board just off the fantail outlines the day's anticipated activities and schedule, the best laid plans of engineers and scientists.

We all woke up this morning, hungry for information on the status of the first dive, anxious to hear tales from the midnight to 4 a.m. shift, only to find ROPOS still on the fantail. Soon we expect, soon we hope, soon we know that the focus will move out of the lab and onto the fantail when ROPOS goes over the side and everyone's attention and energy will shift to the ocean floor.

Myles Gordon