March 2, 2008


Finally! About 3:00 a.m. we were able to resume coring. Spirits are
noticeably higher. We have recovered 1 kasten core, 1 box core and 3
megacores since, with a CTD thrown in to mix things up. Sarah also found
more cool animals under the microscope. Here’s a Prionospio (another
polychaete worm). Hopefully the detail in the photo won’t be lost during
our email transfer.




Because we know you may be growing weary of all the core talk, we’ve
included two pictures of the bridge. Rick, the third mate, is at the
helm. One of his many jobs includes holding the ship on station as the
core goes in and then to position the ship safely while the core is
recovered. You can see the megacorer on the monitor in the second photo.
Sometimes, when we hit a large swell in the middle of a sensitive task, we
razz them, shouting out “Hey, who’s driving this thing?”, but you can tell
from the bridge panel, it takes a lot of talent and multitasking to keep
us on target and safe.






Apparently we owe some bryozoans an apology. It’s been brought to our
attention that we misspelled it recently. We imagine there has been no
shortage of typos and grammatical errors over the past few weeks.
Conditions are less than perfect out here so don’t doubt our collective
educations… if we were on a non-rocking platform and rested we would
surely do better.

With any luck, we’ll finish up our fourth station within 24 hours.

Position: 66 degrees 59.141 minutes South; 69 degrees 43.128 minutes West
Heading: 24.3 degrees
Speed over ground: 2.6 knots
Air temp. 1.4 degrees C; Water temp. 1.036 degrees