Here's an email describing the first part of my trip, check it out.
To catch you up, here's a summary of the trip so far---
April 5th, 7:00am, Brookie drops me off at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Nimitz Marine Facility where the NOAA ship Ka'imimoana ("Ocean Seeker") was moored.
NOAA-KA Front, NOAA-Ka Back, NOAA_KA Back 2.
, buoydeck1, back of da boat, Grate Deck articles, Buoy Float1, 
, Buoy Deck
We were "steamin' and dreamin'" for 5 days to 12N, 110W where we had our first CTD (the Conductivity-Temperature-Depth) "Cast". The CTD is an instrument that measures conductivity (which gives you salinity of the water), temp., depth (from a pressure gauge) and all of these parameters are used to calculate the density of the water. In addition to these, there is an oxygen sensor and about 24 "Niskin" bottles to get water samples from certain depths. These Niskin bottles are open while the CTD is lowered through the water, but when the CTD approaches a depth we want water from we electronically close them from the computer I'm using right now. If you have the address of the Ka'imimoana homepage, I'll have them put a photo of me next to it soon.
Here's the CTD: 
more, more, more,
Recovery 
more, more
This NOAA ship is dedicated to servicing the buoys of the TAO (Tropical-Atmosphere-Ocean) network, they are the only method for getting real-time meteorological/oceanographic data from the tropical Pacific, which is important for understanding the state of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO)--events that have global consequences and you probably know that already. Simply put, the ENSO state has to do with the distribution of temperature in the tropical Pacific ocean and this is easily identified with the data supplied from these buoys. So, the reason for this trip is to service these buoys, but it would be a waste of money (~$10-20,000 a day) if this ship was out here only doing that... and that's where the CTD comes in. There are also a variety of other projects going on at the same time, basically anyone interested in the getting data from the tropical Pacific wants to use this ship because it is always out here. There are projects from Princeton collecting air samples, from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) looking at marine chemistry, and people from my school looking at the levels of Carbon Dioxide in the surface ocean. I am technically employed by MBARI to collect their samples while I collect water for my own research project--looking at the isotopic composition of nitrate, an important nutrient for photosynthesis and potentially a huge clue to what drives climate change in the past and probably the future.
The work part of the cruise consists of the ship visiting all the buoys along the 110W and 95W lines of longitude (8 above and below the equator and one on the equator) and I was doing the CTD work at each of these stop off points. I collect the water in 60ml bottles, put them in the freezer (so the plants in the water don't change what I'm looking for) and when I get back on land, I'll be taking them to Princeton later this summer to do the analysis.
(The rest of the letter in Part 2)
Here's some photos of the many different skies:
the "cast", 
