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Long-Term Ocean Climate Observations (LOCO) – D301/302
Cruise Diary – 30th March 2006	Sander watching sunrise
Thursday - Until midnight dragging was continued, but not successfully. We are quite sure that we hit the mooring twice, at one trial our dragging line broke and, most probably, during one other trial the mooring line must have broken. Anyhow, we are sure now that the releases were lying flat on the seafloor, indicating that the floatation must have collapsed….. Happily we had just enough spare instruments to be able to deploy a new mooring on the location of the lost one. It is almost a pleasure to wake up very early here. Experiencing the sunrise with beautiful colors at the horizon is great. That helped to forget about the lost mooring. One of the most important instruments is shown on the picture. It is an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP).
An ADCP transmits sound waves that reflect from particles in the water. The frequency shift (Doppler shift) of the sound that is received back is a measure for the speed of the water. Such an instrument can measure the current profile over a distance of 600 m. They are at the top (600 m below surface) of all moorings and provide us the most important information. Today the sediment trap mooring for geo-chemical studies was deployed also. The size of these traps makes the deploying of such a mooring a rather difficult. However, thanks to the experienced technicians and crew (and the calm sea) everything went very smoothly.
Deployment of an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP)	Preparing a sediment trap