Something Exciting

Post written by Charlie:

Okay, so there was something interesting that happened tonight. We happened to be doing a deep water station, where the sea floor was around 2800 meters below the surface, and had deployed our multi-core unit, which sinks to the sea floor and takes several sediment core samples. This was the second deployment of the unit as the operators must have wanted to get as much mud as possible, but on its way up, just 180 meters from the surface, somehow the cable attached to it slipped off its winch wheel, or drum or whatever you call it. This resulted in a complete loss of upward movement of the multi-core, so it was dangling in the water 180 meters below the surface with a load of mud. It took quite a while and in the wee hours of the morning, it was repaired and the cables realigned back into their original placement. As you can imagine, we're on something of a tight schedule here and can't afford to dally around, and this inconvenience cost us the samplings from three other stations which were supposed to come after the deep water one. The night was completely thrown off for everyone as they all had to put their nets and CTD's on hold until the winch was repaired and thoroughly checked out to make sure whatever happened that allowed the cable to slip would not occur again. Since I had all this free time I played a really fun card game called Blackjack, which isn't related to the classic casino version where you have to get 21 points. This game is like a hybrid of Uno and crazy 8's. It was pretty crazy and we burned up a couple of hours playing it. After that I still had several hours to myself so I worked a bit on my presentation, which is coming along nicely. Anyway, since the other group finished with one of their krill growth experiments, we were able to, you'll never guess, filter some water! When we were through, it was time for breakfast so we headed down there for some tasty vittles. Upon finishing my meal, I decided to write my blog and go to bed, which I'm going to do right now. Later everyone and stay frosty.