Introduction

Diary

Participants

 

R/V Pelagia Cruise HERMIONE /CoralFISH
	Diary overview
Saturday, 31 October	Arie with a squid he just caught…
As expected we arrive at the 1900m mooring station south of the Galicia bank at 16:00. We send a sound signal through the water to the acoustic releaser of the mooring that stands at 1900m below us. To our joy it immediately answer that it is still alive. However, there is so much fog that we do not dare to command it to drop its weight and there upon rise to the surface. In this fog we probably cannot find it. So we agree to wait till tomorrow, and hope for a clear day. Instead we do a hopper station, which means a video survey of 2 hours of the seafloor. We see small red bushes of a coral with a flexible skeleton, some pancake sea-urchins, white sausage-like sea- cucumbers, a lot of burrows that seem to laugh at you as they have the form of a clowns mouth, and some fish (rattails and cut-throat eels).
There are some problems with the transfer of video through the cable, and after 40 minutes of good video we have to break it off. It is Halloween, and the youngsters have decorated the bar with ghosts, spiders and enlarged pictures of scary deep-sea fish. Arie caught some really scary living squids with his angle. The make a sound like a trumpet. Marc Lavaleye