Lady Maryland: Trip #4 (Day Seven)

Today has been fairly leisurely, as we were at sea most of the day, sailing through Narragansett Bay, finally headed back towards Rhode Island. The cadets split the day between being on watch and working on their final projects, which involves creating whales of the past and future based on what they know about whales of the present and the various adaptations of whales.

During the educational portion of the day, the cadets learned more about estuaries - how they were formed and why they are so important as mating and nursing grounds for so many different animals. They also returned to their lesson about water health, examining the results of their experiment from a few days ago. They found the calcium carbonate of the egg and crab shell entirely intact in both the fresh and salt water, and very much dissolved in the vinegar, to the point where the egg had almost no shell at all and the crab shell was flexible and bendy, almost like plastic. Though vinegar is an extreme example to represent the pH levels in our oceans, the levels are changing each year, and the cadets were reminded that if these shells could dissolve in strong acid in just a few days, they could definitely be effected by weaker levels of acid throughout their lifetime. Additionally, plankton has much thinner calcium carbonate shells than the full grown crab shells we used for our experiment, and should plankton stop being able to survive, it would effect the food chain all the way to the top.

The cadets, feeling a little somber after this lesson, were cheered up by the fact that we had accidentally anchored right in the middle of a cat boat race track. Though this meant we couldn't go swimming, we spent the night watching small boats race around us in Greenwich Bay, and were promised an early swim call in the morning.

Tomorrow, we head towards Bristol!