64PE368 - Day 5

"Changes in resource limitation and energy transfer“; this is the focus of the CHARLET project. For my Master project, I hope to see those changes back in the collected data of the two cruises. The last days were promising. The fluorescence measurement revealed that, what was the highest value back in the Charlet-3 cruise, is now the lowest one. Surely it is far easier to examine something which is actually abundant :-)

Changed has also the weather. In the first 3 days the sea was so calm that one could think we haven’t even left the harbor yet. So, no more loss of water while pouring and thus no more filling of the container with seawater. This however also means that one gets less careful with the essential strapping of things on board. Today the sea is getting a bit rougher, its time to get strapping conscious! Even though the lab container is still very cold, we were enjoying a few sunny hours on the Offdeck yesterday. Due to the better weather there are no more dead or weak birds on the ship, which means people don’t store pieces of bread in their pockets anymore, just in case the bird comes by.

Tomorrow we’ll be celebrating the biggest change in the Netherlands, the inauguration of Willem-Alexander. Even though the algae don’t care about that and science takes no holidays, we still plan to take out all our orange clothes and be as informed as possible about whats happening on land.
Some things however remain the same. The food is very good and nobody is missing during the meals, even though some of us promised ourselves (me included) to make use of the sports equipment on the ship. The scientists and crew have partly changed, but not their friendliness. The candy box in the wetlab still lightens up the waiting time for the CTD to come up again.

            

It was really nice to be part of half of the Charlet cruises. I have learned a lot of techniques in my first cruise, Charlet-3, which I can now apply on this cruise to speed up the processing of the samples. And, indeed, I do feel as if I needed much more time on the last cruise. While folding filters today, I realized that Amanda, my supervisor, must have been so patient on the last cruise. So, for me, the cruises have greatly improved my field work knowledge, which sometimes also requires improvisation. But this is, where Rocky comes in, and you can read about Rocky in the former blog.