B243

Recalling to about two weeks ago I was able to go out on my second BATS cruise. It had been delayed and delayed and little bit more delayed. After leaving Norfolk from its winter repairs the Atlantic Explorer made its to Bermuda initially with two engines then down to one. So not only that caused delays, but they needed to fly a engineer out to repair it. He was around a few nights, so I was able to drink with him a little bit. I've never been around a "redneck" and I don't mean that in a stupid, stereotypical way...its just if I described him as scraggly looking with a major southern drawl, wearing a dirty 'Bama hat and had teeth worse than most Brits around here you'd come to the conclusion that he is related to the Genus "redneck". Note, from what I've seen, most Brits have perfectly normal teeth. That being said, the visiting engineer was very friendly, got drunk very easily(to my surprise) and was not dumb at all. And fixed the boat.

So, we were able to depart from St. George's wharf around 800 on Saturday, the 7th. The first part of the cruise is relatively nice because I do basically jack shit. It takes maybe an hour or so to depart to our first station, Hydrostation S. BATS drops a CTD down to get a profile(for temp, chlorophyll, salinity, O2) and for a few samples. Then we departed to our next station.

I'm still learning what goes on at each station. It took me a while during this cruise to kind of get things figured out. I was basically on my own with all of the sampling for Phosphate and as well as samples for project with Arizona State. Luckily, a couple of grad students from ASU were there to help and actually see how their samples are taken. It took a while and luckily, another tech from our lab was there to answer any questions. There are sometimes several parts to sampling. First, is how to take water from the big CTD. Sometimes, the sample goes straight into a freezer. In other cases, chemicals need be added for preservation or the sample may need to be filtered. All of this takes time understanding the protocol and bumps and questions that go along the way.

Working during a cruise is a nice change of pace from the morning to evening routine. Because we try to fit as much as possible during the cruise, science is almost always going on, if not steaming from station to station. I don't have the schedule from the past cruise, but here is a sample of the short cruise(B243a) leaving Friday...

Day 2: Saturday 21 February sunrise: 0655, sunset: 1810

0000 Deploy Neuer PITS
0100 Depart for BATS, on station by 0400
0430 CTD cast (0-1000m, production), BATS, BBOP
0630 Deploy production array
0730 SPMR
0900 SPMR
CTD (0-500m, shallow core) BATS, BBOP
1300 Zooplankton tows (x2, 0-250m)
CTD (0-1200m), BBOP optics, MO timeshare
1500 Kadko surface water collection (science SW, or surface CTD)
1700 SPMR
1800 Recover production array
CTD (0-500m) profile
2000 Relocate on PITS
2100 Recover Neuer PITS
2200 Relocate to Hydrostation

So you can see at any part of the day, you may be called to duty. Looking at this schedule, the only thing I'm doing on this cruise is related to PITS. So, I will most likely take samples around Midnight, deploy the sediment trap, and then further take care of samples. Most likely working from 11pm to 2am. Nice to do things different. The last 2 days of B243, my work hours were 2200 to 300-400 or so.

The rest of the cruise is eating, sleeping, and hanging out in the lounge. Hours work each day can be light or heavy and late or mid-day.

I actually didn't snap any photos during the cruise. It wasn't calm, but it also wasn't bad weather. Top wind speeds were maybe 30+ knots or so, enough to cancel only a few hours of science. I'll bring the camera for the next cruise.

Overall, the cruise went well. I'm pretty confident with all of our lab's Sea Operations.