Dear all,

This is where it all ends, the ship docked at 0800 o’clock this morning at Fairlie in the Clyde, and we are currently in the process of unloading all our kit, including all the various samples that were collected out on the ridge. It was a pleasure to read Monty’s last dayprogramme, ending with the obligatory: that’s all folks! I can’t help feeling slightly blue as all members will spread to every corner of the country (some abroad).

Thursday’s RPC (request the pleasure of your company), was a nice social event in which Monty invited everyone to a gathering at the ship bar, which was a nice opportunity for crew and scientists to discuss the findings of the cruise over a drink or two.
Last night EK60 calibration of Arran went surprisingly smoothly, my team mates and I finished work at around 0300 o’clock, after having arrived at the location at 1430. Yesterdays events involved the final CTD of the cruise, and the excitement of the PML team (especially Gavins) was infectious, rubbing off on all of us. The good mood was unfortunately ruined by Birkir who, by the way, is still sulking a bit because he lost his hat off the side of the ship (see picture of Birkir with no hat).

Birkir (with no hat), Tom (with hat) and Martin (with hat AND cosy ear flaps).

We also saw the deployment of the rescue boat, allowing for the photographer David Shale to get some footage of the ship from the sea. A lucky few were thus able to make across to shore, on the beautiful island of Aran. Reliable sources tell me that the main attraction was the local chocolate shop. The rest of us could only watch in envy as our colleagues were setting foot on land for the first time.

As this is the last entry of this cruises’ blog I hope that all you folks back home have enjoyed reading about our adventures. We’ve certainly enjoyed sharing our work, and look forward to next year, so please do watch this space for news about the 2008 ECOMAR Discovery cruise!

Best,

Tom Bech Letessier
PhD student, PERG, University of St Andrews

Today has been very busy for the biologists. An otter trawl was landed early this morning full of deep water marine life. Fish, starfish, urchins, holothurians and crustaceans were all avidly sorted, examined, sized and described by a large team of dedicated scientists in what looked to the untrained eye like a production line. This took most of the day to complete. Along side this two RMT trawls were completed, examining the top layers of the ocean for biomass of various types to correlate with the acoustic data that we have been collecting. This evening a SHRIMP run is underway, looking at the habitats and (slow-moving) animals that live on the seafloor some 2,600m down. This run was postponed from yesterday evening when a fault in the cable that supplies SHRIMP with power and communications developed. This meant a long night for the technicians to get it ready for today.

OTSB (bottom otter trawl) catch.

Scientists eagerly await the morning’s haul (from left to right: Ian Cross, Will Reid, Tom Letessier [waving] and Tonya Rogacheva).

This brings me neatly on to the role the technicians play in supporting the scientists aboard the vessel. The beginning of a cruise for the technical staff starts well before the ship sets off. Equipment has to be assembled together either from existing stocks, bought new form commercial sources or specially customised or developed for a particular scientific requirement. In this latter case, development can start a year or more before the use of the equipment at sea.

Depending on the type of cruise, a team of technicians is assembled to best suit the requirements of the trip – mechanical, electronic, computer and instrumentation experts each with their own specialities and skill sets. On board for JC011 there are three mechanical, two electronic and one computer technician, each specialising in one or more aspects of the cruise as well as providing more general engineering support. To paraphrase a well known saying, you have to be ‘a jack of most trades and master of lots’. This was well illustrated yesterday evening during the re-termination of the SHRIMP cable. One moment you are wielding a grinder to cut the cable while a colleague heats up the termination module with a blow torch in order to release the cable, in other words work that would expect to see in a blacksmiths. While later in the same process you are connecting a plug to the fibre-optic strand in the cable – thinner than a human hair – and having to look down a microscope to polish the end. Such is the range of skills required.

Another requirement for the seagoing technician is the ability to troubleshoot and fix equipment with the resources available on the ship. This has, in the past, included raiding the sonar spares box in order to fix the ship’s washing machine – a most important function as you can imagine.

Nothing so dramatic has happened this evening as I write this with SHRIMP taking nice video images of the seafloor with just the changing of tapes and disks required.

Ian Rouse, Oceanographic engineer
NOC Southampton