This is my second entry for AMT19 and I must confess that I’m not at my best first thing in the morning so I’ve waited until mid-morning to start this piece. My alarm went off at 4:00am and I was already half-awake so switched it off. Then with a start I sat upright in my bunk and it was 4:45am. I’d done it – dropped off into a deep sleep again. Confusion reigned, two feet down, one leg of my jeans and the impossible struggle to understand why they had shrunk overnight on the back of a chair. I hauled myself up on deck for the pre-dawn CTD wondering why my tongue felt and tasted like a piece of old leather. A cold claw of sleep craving (and the need for coffee and bacon) was pulling at my insides and trying to drag me back to the cabin – so I went. I cleaned my teeth and re-surfaced to face another fine day.
Where’s the coffee?
We’ve been making good progress and the science programme has taken on a momentum that comes with the familiarity and comfort of establishing a time effective set of protocols, which irons out the initial mayhem of the first week or so. Everyone has meshed with everyone else in a spirit of mutual co-operation or sympathy depending on time of day and proximity of the next meal.
I’ve had a welcome departure from oxygen titrations in as much that Jo Dixon & Rachel Beale (PML) have undertaken a (30 hour) diel experiment and needed to stay with the same body of water for the duration. I was responsible for preparing a drifter buoy and mapping its position relative to the ship so that we could remain on station.
The buoy transmitted its GPS position to a modem interfaced to a PC on the ships’ bridge along with a separate input from the ship’s GPS position. The relative positions of ships’ track and buoy track were then plotted in real time. (I must confess that I owe a debt of thanks to my colleague Ricardo Torres at PML for initially setting the system up before we sailed from the UK).
There was a strobe light on the buoy for easy identification at night but true to form, it was flashing well on the deck but as it was deployed over the stern it decided to give up the ghost – gremlins everywhere. The ships’ officers however took all this in their stride and managed to use the PC plot to maintain a safe working distance.
Drifter buoy and drogue preparation on the deck
We are currently heading for the equator which is about another 200 miles to the south and there are quite a few people, myself included, who haven’t ‘crossed the line’ before, so the ceremony should be quite interesting if not lively. It’s always done in the best of fun and hopefully there will be some interesting photos to take home.
The daily routine of fulfilling our scientific objectives has become a way of life and we are able to adjust our time commitments to take an interest in some of the more interesting and less routine aspects of other peoples research focus.
One of the highlights for me has been the successful deployment of SHRIMP (Sea-bed High Resolution Imaging Platform) by Libby Ross from NOC, Southampton and the NMF-SS lads to depths of over 5000 metres to photograph & video the sea-bed and the creatures that live on it. To see a squid at over 3 miles deep attack a camera lens was really quite surreal.