February 23, 2008

Today we finished working our first station. The weather has deteriorated
some, but on the whole it is not too bad. We’ve had periods of fog and
light rain. The seas have picked up some and the decks are awash. It has
not stopped our work or the humbacks from coming by to visit.



Today we did a camera tow along the bottom. We’re working on trying to
get a picture or two of the seafloor to share. We megacored one last time
at this station. You can see us pulling the individual cores off in the
rain. Around lunch time it cleared up enough for us to process a kasten
core outside on the deck. We use cut-off syringes to punch out plugs of
sediment and then centrifuge it to remove the water from porespaces in the
mud (pic). Now it’s dreary again.





Most folks are excited that the steam between here and the next station
will take at least 15 hours. It allows us to catch up on analyses,
laundry and sleep.

We’ve heard about a cool website that allows you to see real-time GPS
positions for ships at sea. It’s
www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/researchships.phtml . We can’t check it from
here to see how user friendly it is, but it maybe worth a look. We are
aboard the R/V L.M. Gould.

Position: 63 degrees 2.161 minutes South, 61 degrees 36.862 minutes West
Speed over ground: 1.5 knots (we’re pulling a trawl)
Heading: 279.1
Air temp. 4.5 degrees C ; Water temp. 1.640 degrees C