3 July

R/V Pelagia Cruise HERMES

Monday, 3 July 2006	Lander
Today we were going to pick up the landers. After our accident with the Hopper camera and the fisherman's cable we were a bit nervous if anything like that would also have happened to the lander. Fortunately everything went well, only the flag was lost. During sailing to pick up the other lander we did another transect with the Hopper camera.
Again we seemed to get stuck behind something. With the memory of yesterday fresh in our minds we decided not to take our chances and to pull it up again. Fortunately we did not pick up any cables and everything was fine. The second lander also came safely to the surface, gloriously waving its flag. Everything had worked according to plan, we have got a lot of data and beautiful footage of the coral garden in which the lander was placed on top of the Haas Mound. My main task during this cruise was the sieving of the boxcore and collecting the live and dead material after everyone else had taken their samples from the boxcores. I sieved them on a 0.5 mm sieve and preserved the animals on formalin.� Furthermore I was responsible for the filtration of the water samples, taken with the CTD or with the �Waterkist�. These filters are going to be used for analysis of the pigments back at the NIOZ. It was a beautiful day and no busy program for me so after lunch I was able to enjoy the sunshine on deck. After a while the people who had been working really hard on processing their data on the computers also discovered the sun and soon there was a nice gathering on the aft deck of people enjoying the sunshine. Sanne