Back to the final two dives…I hope my words do them justice. For the first, we dove into the emerald green and as we descended the bottom slowly appeared. There were green urchins everywhere! We continued to make our way down ledge after ledge. The urchins started thinning out… sea stars, horse mussels, and a dark orange sponge began to dominate our views. My dive buddy and I continued to descend. Sixty feet down, daylight was struggling to break through the water. There was a field of stalked tunicates along the wall face in front of us. We used the current to drift for a little bit. There was life everywhere you looked. Horse mussels, sponges, stalked tunicates, snails, sea ravens, sculpins, sea stars…. it was really cool! We had forgotten that we were there to work. Back on the Lophius, all of the divers exchanged stories of what they had seen. The best way I can describe it is to imagine a child at a birthday party, seeing all of those brightly wrapped presents. Everyone was beaming!

The last full dive was one something I’ll never forget. My dive buddy and I were going to look for a certain type of sea star and stalked tunicate. When we reached a depth of seventy feet, we encountered large lobsters, sculpins, sea ravens, and numerous invertebrates. We sent our specimens to the surface and began exploring. We found several collapsed caves and a pinnacle with lots of life around it.

What I didn’t realize was that the best was yet to come. As we made our way back to the surface, we had to stop to decompress at 15 feet. Holding on to a blade of brown kelp, I wondered what it would be like to turn around and look out in the green abyss. When I did, there was a school of a hundred pollock only inches away from me. The bubbles from my SCUBA scared them momentarily, but they would return coming closer. It felt like they were using me for shelter and that I was in a bait ball. All of a sudden, the pollock moved closer. I looked past them and saw a school of mackerel sweeping in. These beautiful fish with their tiger stripes appeared from the darkness, skirted the pollock school, and swam off into the darkness. As a diver, to be in the middle of so much life was one of the coolest feelings I’ve ever had underwater. Lets just say that I couldn’t wait to break the surface to tell the rest of the team what I had seen. Again, I wish I had pictures.

Pack up day was completely different from the rest of the trip. We had what Bostonians would call a mini nor’easter. Eastport was trying to remind us that Mother Nature was always in charge and that we had been fortunate this year.

Senior Aquarist Paul Leonard normally spends his time at the Aquarium caring for penguins. Now, he's joining the Divers and Expeditions Blog from Eastport, Maine, where New England Aquarium scuba divers are plunging into freezing cold water and navigating extreme tidal currents in search of cold water specimens.

The last few days have been great! The weather finally died down and we’ve been able to have full, productive days of specimen collecting. Since we have to dive on the tidal changes, we’re limited to how many dives we can do each day. It’s a great plan since after each dive we’re required to have “out of the water time.” This insures that we don’t have any dive related injuries. Since we missed out on getting a lot of dives in the first day, there is a little pressure for us to be successful. Everyone has to chip in. Some of dives even take place late at night!

We have a wish list of specific animals and invertebrates that are needed for the Aquarium’s Northern Exhibits, like the Gulf of Maine Exhibit. The hardest part is that these animals are always moving. Over the decades, thanks to the observations of the dive teams, we’ve been able to compile a detailed catalog of where the animals should be. The exciting thing is that you don’t know what is exactly on the bottom until you get there.

Our work always seems to make the locals a little curious and they stop by to see what’s going on.

Paul--