Through the night and most of the day the George Bligh Bank transect was sampled. The data was downloaded from the tiny memory card taken from yesterday's recovered mooring and many more polystyrene cups were sent to the bottom to shrink.
The highlight of the day was the opening of the 2 mystery boxes marked Met Office - instructions inside. Inside were 4 Argo floats which are to be deployed as part of the world ocean climate monitoring programme and Karen Wilson (SAMS student) will report on the background to this and the actual deployment in her blog at the weekend.
The weather has been really amazing so far for this part of the Atlantic. It is predicted as fair until the middle of next week when this is the nasty forecast
Fortunately we shoud be near Iceland by then and will hopefully miss it.
Today Ollie Wilmott, masters student from NOC, will share his view of the cruise so far.
It all began with a
prospective email about six or seven months ago. At the time I was looking for
a potential research project within the fields of mesoscale dynamics and/or
biogeochemistry, the areas of oceanography I have a keen interest in. Several emails
later things began to move in the right direction and I soon found myself
signing risk assessment forms and medical certificates in preparation for one
of the most valuable pieces of work experience that I am likely to get in my
time at university. I guess my take home point is this: be persistent. If you
harass enough of the right people there’s a good chance you can take part in
real scientific research out on the high seas, or in our case so far, flat
seas. To be honest I’m not entirely convinced we’re in the North Atlantic. The
D379 conspiracy…..
Today
We are nearing the
end of our transect of the George Bligh Bank and will soon be heading south to
re-join the extended Ellett Line. The last two days have been easy for me
because I haven’t needed to collect water samples for SEM analyses. However karma
wasn’t on my side and John Wyner introduced me to the salinometer. God damn, I
knew there was a reason I was part of the ‘Expendables’ team! Emily and I have
been assigned a less than glamorous job, hours of solitary confinement
analysing seawater by the gallon. Charlotte assured me that it would only take
an hour to work through a crate of seawater. Lies. More like two hours. If it
hadn’t been for my extensive collection of Garry Glitter tunes I’m fairly
certain I would have thrown myself overboard long ago and wouldn’t be here to
write todays blog. Apart from that I have no news. Everybody seems to be
working as hard as ever and we are ahead of schedule which I can only assume is
a good thing. Cheers, Ollie. 
How cruel can we be to students? We'll see. The mist is closing around us so there is not much chance of spotting bioluminescence tonight nor admiring the sunset. Thank goodness for radar!
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