Friday afternoon strikes me as the ideal time to send out our final email of the cruise. Things have been winding down late this week as we organize all of our samples, begin to pack and clean out our lab spaces and slowly catch up on our sleep. We are in the fourth week of this cruise; it's my tenth week at sea since mid-July and, more specifically, my eighth week this year aboard the R/V ATLANTIS. That's an unusual amount of time at sea for me, but when really good opportunities arise, you just can't turn them down.

This cruise has been one of those good opportunities. I've had a chance to see a hydrothermal vent habitat populated with what for me is a different suite of vent fauna. I imagine that visiting here after spending so much time studying comparable vents on The Juan de Fuca Ridge is like going to Africa's Serengeti Plain and seeing giraffes, wildebeests and zebras after studying bison and antelope on the North American Great Plains. It isn't that area and its fauna are better than the other, but seeing both gives you a better understanding of the whole system. I've gotten to meet some great people and live and work with them every minute of every hour of every one of the last 24 days. As is typical of human interactions, we've all had our moments and I'm sure that all of us haven't approved of exactly what the others have done all the time (as in -doesn't he/she know better than that?! Or perhaps, how can he/she be telling that joke again?!), but overall we've gotten along well.

The ship's crew has done everything they could to make our cruise a good one. But we're ready to be home - where it's quiet, where the rooms don't move, where we have our own space, music, news, TV and kitchens. We meet with customs inspectors at Puntarenas, Costa Rica early Sunday if everything goes right and nearly everyone in the science party, the ALVIN group and some of the crew will fly out of Costa Rica by Monday noon. The science party isn't the only ones anxious to go home.

When I was out on the ATLANTIS in September working on another research project to document deep-sea diversity, I remember asking the Chief Engineer Kevin Fisk if he would be out with us now. He said no pretty vehemently. He'd been at sea for months at that point and his wife had just emailed him a picture of his 18-month old daughter and he was feeling like he should be there. He was counting on spending Thanksgiving with them. It didn't happen. At the last minute, he was called back to the ship to fill in for a colleague who had a family medical emergency. I'm glad Kevin's here; he's a great guy, and he makes things work. He was happy to help his colleague when he needed it, even though it meant another holiday and another month 1000's of miles away from his own family. But right now, more than anything in the world, he wants to go home. We're all getting very close to the point of feeling like that even though we've only been out here for a matter of weeks. The people who live their lives at sea are a special group.