I saw some marine mammals!

I went to the top deck at 5:45 AM and helped set up the Big Eyes and the computer. It took awhile for everything to get ready and we finally started to look for whales and dolphins. A watch lasts for 90 minutes and the observer spends 30 minutes on each Big Eye and 30 minutes on the computer. There are five members on an observing team. At the beginning of the day three team members are assigned to the three positions: port Big Eye, computer, and starboard Big Eye. Every 30 minutes the observers rotate a position to the right, so if you started at the port Big Eye (like I did) then you would rotate to the computer and 30 minutes later rotate to the starboard Big Eye. When you finish with the starboard Big Eye, you rotate out for 60 minutes and then return an hour later at the port Big Eye.

My first watch was shortened because we were setting up, but on the second watch I saw a Risso's dolphin. Right near the end of my watch I saw a whale breach and then the big splash.
Other people saw the splash, so they're pretty sure it was too big to be a tunafish. They think it might have been a sperm whale, so maybe I saw a sperm whale.

It rained a lot today. It seems like all we did was cover and uncover the Big Eyes. From 4:30-5:00 I saw what I thought were dolphins but they turned out to be a small inflatable raft-yellow on one side and black on the other. The black side when it was rolling in the wind, almost four miles away, looked very dolphin-like so I'm calling it a "lifeboat dolphin". The Bigelow had to pick up the lifeboat and check it out to make sure there wasn't a name on it from a ship. It didn't look like a regulation lifeboat, it was more like a child's toy boat. So that's what the picture is: my lifeboat dolphin.