Day 7 Monday October 3, 2011 12:43 GMT

Another beautiful, sunny, blue, calm day out on the water.  This is the third day that whales have been spotted from the ship as well.  The novelty of it hasn't worn off and I hope that it doesn't.

There has been a cold that's making its way around the ship, so some of us are feeling a bit under this beautiful weather.  That hasn't held us back from making progress on our voyage.  We released another GDP drifter and also released our first Argo float.

Argo is a broad-scale, global array of profiling floats that measure temperature and salinity.  These floats are battery powered and are made to drift around the oceans at specified depths.  Usually every 10 days they pop up to the surface to take more measurements and relay their data and position to satellites.
For more information about the Argo program and the floats go to:
http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/About_Argo.html

We also had our first time change of the cruise, we are now 5 hours ahead of EST instead of 6!  Plus our first set of cups were fantastic.  We will be sending down several bags more through this cruise and hopefully will have quite a collection to bring home with us.

Thanks for reading!
-Elizabeth

If you are tracking our progress we are now located at:
29 44.99'S  and  4 25.49'E

Below are some photos of; a)our beautiful, calm seas, b) An Argo float being deployed, c) The cycle of an Argo float and d) Leaving Cape Town, the first go-around.