0330 – Not dumping until sunrise means I have hours to kill. I clock over an hour in the ‘gym’; boxing, doing yoga and laps between the ‘gym’ and the ‘Laundromat’. On deck, between stairwells, it’s windy and wet outside… where did this rain come from?! But once showered and up on the bridge, I see we’re in a very dense fog. We have a warning light and fog horn going and we’re still pumping in, but moving at a safer speed. The waves have picked up more than I’d experienced so far, but I was pleased to discover no sickness and a rather childlike enjoyment in the bouncy sensation! Everything swings, creaks and moans from side to side. In seconds, my view of the blackened sea becomes a view of the blackened sky.

0800 – The offshore material that we’ve been dredging is a smooth, black mud. It smells sulfurous and coats the inside of the baskets like dirty molasses. The amount of marine life being sucked up has tripled. Dozens of horseshoe crabs, starfish, conches, spider crabs, king crabs, sea weed, plant life and a handful of odd trash (plastics, metals, clothes, water bottles, goggles, flippers, etc.) are coming up in every load. So far, no turtles, which is a good thing. Despite the sadness of the amount of death that dredging brings, I find it interesting and educational… I’ve genuinely come to like rummaging through the dirty baskets. It’s not always so pretty, but if we weren’t here looking over the shoulders of these operations, they could stop using turtle deflectors, or not follow the strict regulations set in place to protect marine life. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.

1215 – Cabin fever! We have lunch and I’m too energetic to sleep. I decide to stay up and explore the next load with my companion so we can get some photos of us going down the hatch and getting rather dirty. The boat is rocking rampantly again, and we find ourselves in fits of giggles. Is this cabin fever? I feel like a pinball swaying and bumping about. Everything sets us off in bouts of laughter… the rocking of the boat, my worn muscles struggling to pull open a door that I needed to push; mud stains on the bum of my wet gear… We head into the baskets, count our specimens and have a muddy modeling session. I overhear one of the deckhands on the radio, “Turtle girls’ gone crazy!” and am sent into another fit of laugher.