*4/5 november

R/V Pelagia Cruise HERMIONE /CoralFISH
	Diary overview
Wednesday/Thursday, 4/5 November	Our "cosy" place in the harbour of Lisbon.
The end of our expedition is inevitably drawing near. Although it still takes the entire Wednesday and early hours of Thursday to cover the more than 200 miles to Lisbon, we notice more ships around us as we are getting closer to our destination. One last stop is made for testing the multicorer. On Wednesday evening an orange glow above the horizon announces that we are approaching the inhabited world, and in the course of the night millions of tiny orange sparks appear in the dark in front of the ship. In the first light of Thursday morning the distant outlines of Lisbon can be distinguished, set against the dark contours of the Sintra and Arrabida hills. RV Pelagia slowly moves ahead to the entrance of the Tagus river, waiting for permission from the naval authorities to travel the last few miles upstream to port.
Behind us are three weeks of intense work at sea, where we worked hard to lift some of the veil of mystery shrouding the deep-sea world. Every day expecting that the grey autumnal ocean would turn a grimmer face upon us, and impede us to work any further. But we have been extremely lucky, with only two working days lost due to storm, and weather turning really bad only when we left the area. We were very successful in multiple deployments of our landers and in collecting many good bottom samples, providing us valuable and often surprising new information about the inhabitants of the deep water coral ecosystems. Who would have thought that deep-sea rattail fish are so fond of spinach? Or that our mackerel bait would be bitten to shreds by swarms of tiny crustaceans, rather than by big mouthed sharks? The fish and coral specimens collected for isotope and fatty acid analysis will hopefully tell us more about the peculiar feeding tastes of deep-sea fauna. In the meantime, three landers will stay out there until next year monitoring the physical environment of Galway Mound and deep Whittard Canyon. Although our expedition will soon end officially as we moor off in Lisbon, there will be a lot of work ahead of us. First packing our samples and saving our data and cleaning the labs. Loading and unloading equipment and taking in stores for the ship, preparing the ship for its departure next day. And of course, writing the cruise report, accounting of our different activities and preliminary results. For such an eventful and non-routine expedition, this will require a bit more than copying last year's report and changing station numbers and dates. As we approach the historical city of Lisbon from where many adventurous sailors departed in the past centuries to discover new continents and new seas, we feel privileged of taking a humble part in the continuing discovery of the still vast unknown parts of our planet. We hope that through this cruise diary we have succeeded to share some of our excitement with you. Henko de Stigter Greeting you on behalf of all participants: Erwin Becks, Inge van den Beld, Magda Bergman, Lorendz Boom, Mayke van den Brande, Gerard Duineveld, Fred Hymstra, Nanne van Hoytema, Rachel Jeffreys, James Keating, Klaas Kikkert, Marcel de Kleine, Bob Koster, Marc Lavaleye, Hans van der Linde, Thom Linley, Arie Jan Plug, Bert Puyman, Cor Stevens, Jose Vitoria, Martin de Vries, Thalia Watnough and Leon Wuis.