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DISPATCH 1 | 06.03.2007 | Meeting the Ship in Key West The expedition starts for most of our scientific party at 10:30 AM on Sunday June 3rd in the parking lot of the Link Engineering Building at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in Fort Pierce, Florida. The R/V Seward Johnson left Harbor Branch a week before on a NOAA Ocean Exploration funded expedition to study deep-coral reefs off Florida. Chief Scientist John Reed is already on the ship, as he is one of the Chief Scientists for the NOAA trip. Also on the ship are Tara Pitts, Senior Research Assistant at HBOI and Priscilla Winder, a graduate student from Florida Atlantic University. They went on the NOAA trip to help John with processing samples. 
Shirley Pomponi, sponge biologist and
CEO/President of HBOI met the ship on Saturday in Key West. The rest of us will meet the
ship in Key West Florida at 6 PM on Sunday.
Traveling to the Keys from the HBOI campus are myself, Amy Wright, Co-Chief scientist for the expedition; Esther Guzman, Cell Biologist, Kathleen Janda, Microbiologist; Jennifer Choate, Postdoctoral fellow; Hilaire Wangun, Postdoctoral Fellow; Latasha "Tasha" Amisial, graduate student at the Medical University of South Carolina; Kate Douglas, Rutgers student; Alanna Mitchell, journalist; Rex "Chip" Baumberger, Fish Biologist; and Jill Roberts, Chemist. Everybody is pretty excited and the Krispy Creme donuts that Tasha brought are keeping our energy levels high. 
Thankfully, the trip to Key West was uneventful. Many of the party in the van I am driving have never been to the Keys. In fact, for a few of them, this is their first trip to Florida. They are suitably impressed with the jewel like waters of the Keys and as we cross the many causeways and bridges that lead between the islands that make up the Florida Keys, I hear the comment: "I need to come back here on vacation - this is beautiful", more than one time as we continue southwards. In Key West, the ship is just anchoring up off Mallory Square as we arrive. Unfortunately there isn't a dock available to bring the ship into port and so they have rented a slip at the Westin Inn so that we can run one of the small boats back and forth between the ship and the dock to transfer personnel and equipment. The process of transferring people to and from the ship will take a few hours. As we arrive, we get a call from another scientist in our party, Brad Rosenhiem who has just flown in from Boston. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Woods Hole. They weren't ready to pick us up so our group walked into Old Town, Key West for dinner. The highlight of that meal was the chickens and 
roosters flying around the trees in the outdoor restaurant we chose to eat
in, and the little biddies running across your feet. This is just one of the many interesting
things that make Key West, the southernmost city in the United States, so quirky and special.
The ship was set to leave our anchorage in Key West and head to our first operations area, off the Dry Tortugas at 11 PM. By then, we managed to get all our people and equipment on the ship, the minivans returned to the rental office and even have time for a short walk around Key West. Tonight: South to Tortugas. 
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