Generally speaking I’m one of those people who thinks of 4:30 as the hour before finishing work for the day or, on occasion, the time in the morning that my teenage son brings his Boeing Fiesta Zetec into land outside the house and gives the engine one torturous final kick, which rattles the windows in a 50m radius before the thing finally dies along with the Rap Band in the boot.
The pleasure of rising at 4:00 am and arriving bright and cheerful at the pre-dawn (Conductivity Temperature Depth)CTD sample is still eluding me. My cabin feels like it’s on the waterline and the regular rinse cycle of waves around my porthole, along with the muted noise of ships’ machinery through the floors and bulkheads, still takes some getting used to even after 30 years of sea-going.
‘Missionaries’ from PML and international colleagues are to be found whistling and moving briskly about their pre-sampling preparations as I appear like Eeyore (Winnie – the –Pooh) from below decks. “Mornin”, “Mornin”, “Bonjour” hit from all sides and I manage a shadow of a smile on my way to the first caffeine fix of the day.
Shortly the first CTD of the day is hauled out of the water and delicately placed on the deck. Organised chaos ensues as everyone collects their samples from the rosette and then it’s welcome to the ‘Marie-Celeste’. Scientists disappear into deck and container labs, with their precious cargo leaving the wet lab deserted apart from Dougal the NMF-SS technician who is charged with preparing for the next cast. Now I have an hour or so to prepare my water samples for deck incubation and need every second if I’m to be ready before dawn. I’m lucky to have some help from Kevin Tempest, a colleague from Washington State University, without whom the set-up for photosynthesis/respiration experiments would not be so efficiently and rapidly processed.
Kevin Tempest, a colleague from Washington State University
As dawn rises and the smell of bacon drifts down from the galley, the initial panic of the day is over. I’ve finally joined the land of the living and begin to communicate in words of more than one syllable. So far the sea has been kind and the wind has been warm. A short break with the imminent prospect of breakfast and a wander onto the back deck with a second caffeine fix, now life doesn’t seem so bad.
It could be worse ….Sample analysis, software gremlins, anything that can go wrong IS GOING TO!