Another great day greeted us with nearly cloud free skies for Day 09 of the Pisces One Expedition.

We were up at a reasonable hour and started our day with the usual breakfast followed by a morning of personal and engineering tasks. Anthony had a request from his employer back on Earth in a place called Atlanta for something or another and he was quite happy to take the morning to get it done. Talk about the mobile office, doing your day job from Mars via satellite. Adam under took to investigate the minor problems cropping up with the GreenHab on top of his HSO duties and I concentrated on catching up on the paper work to keep the home office up todate on our endeavours.

In the afternoon we ran out of water in the Potable Water Tank over in the Engineering Area so we had to set in motion it's refill. Anthony joined Adam for the afternoon to investigate problems with the GreenHab. I kept on with reports and monitoring the weather satellite images. As they started to look more and more threatening for the next few days, I asked the crew to drop everything and called a crew conference at 14:00. After a brief discussion we decided to abort the afternoon's planned ATV EVA and tackle the top priority item of the refit team's punch list of must do in fair weather projects. We decided to paint the brand new hand rails on the EVA lock stairs.

I set up the webcam to look down out the porthole over the south EVA air lock stairs to broadcast our "out of sim" EVA and we got to work (see EVA report). Later that evening we got e-mail back from all over the world complimenting us on providing a view of our on going operations that were not just folks sitting at their computers looking very intense.

This task was completed by 17:30 and included painting the protruding rebar around the HAB's landing gear outriggers and in the case of the outrigger right by the EVA air lock, well, too many have run into it too often at night because it is black and for safety reasons I ordered it painted white to make it more visible in the dark of the night.

After clean up we got a message from Don in Lowell Ville that he was totally tied up and could we please bring the water tank down to town for the refill ourselves. (he's aware that I learned how to tow heavy objects in the Canadian Military). So it was a quick change into our good Civvies and we took Big Blue, hooked up the water tank and headed off to Lowell Ville [Hanksville] at a crawl given the current state of the dirt road into the HAB is challenging for even a high clearance truck. Another unplanned EVA to challenge the Pisces One team.

In Lowell Ville we found Don at the Whispering Sands (Lowell Ville's premier motel for interplanetary travelers) were he was attempting to carbonize dead animal matter by oxidizing fossilized trees in a steel container. The little Martians were all excited at the prospect of what was soon to be in their mouths enroute to their digestive systems.

So we were shown where to fill the tank ourselves and in the process my two city slicker colleagues (Adam and Anthony) got to see their first ever Buffalo in the flesh. After restoring our water stocks to the full mark, we got more petrol for the ATV's and finally dropped off the garbage. All of this to the torture of our nostrils being tantalized by Don't back yard cooking. Well when your crew has put out the extra kilometer, above and beyond the call of duty, a special reward is called for and I treated my team to dinner at a refined establishment know to many analogue Mars-nauts and interplanetary travelers, Blondie's Diner.

Thus will full stomachs and full tanks I engaged Big Blue's propulsion systems and we crawled out of town with the grace and speed of an overfed snail. The dirt road into the HAB required 4 wheel low range and a dead slow crawl. Even so the capless water tank was to entertain us at every major gut wrenching dip in the road with spectacular water fountain, to the point where it will be renamed Old Faithful.

Getting it backed into place proved to be more challenging as the final dip in the road proved to be just too much even at a crawl and the trailer popped off the hitch. The safety chains I had attached saved the day, but I called off any attempt to rescue the darned thing as it would have been just too dangerous in the pitch black night of the southern Utah high desert.

Thus we retired to the HAB, sent e-mail to Don with photos which Tony kindly took, showing him the problem and asking his assistance in the morning.

Anthony and Adam sat down and did their reports, I sat down and fell asleep, so my 2IC [XO] told me, "Go to bed" and took command for the remainder of the shift. Boy was I ever glad to get the nine hours of sleep that resulted.

So a belated good night to all back on Earth from the Pisces One Expedition, MDRS's Crew 35.