*23 October

R/V Pelagia Cruise HERMIONE /CoralFISH
	Diary overview
Friday, 23 October	A boxcore sample with dropstones and 2 incubation chambers�
Rainbow day. We have the typical Irish weather. Short and long showers beat the ship. When they are gone there are always dark clouds of rain in the distance. Mixed with a bit of sun, these produce lots of rainbows during the day. The ALBEX lander has been prepared for another deployment. With the small crane on the hind deck it is easily put over the railing into the water, and than unleashed. In a free fall it sinks to 900m depth where it lands softly on the seafloor.
A time lapse video will record which animals are attracted by the mackerel bait. When the lander is on the loose, the ship is free to do other things. We use the time to survey the seafloor with two camera systems which are attached to the so called "hopper frame". The frame is lowered to the seafloor on a steel cable. The normal digital camera is connected online with the ship through the copper wire inside the steel cable. The video footage of the camera is stored on its own harddisk, but every second a low resolution picture is also send through the cable to the ship. I am sitting behind the monitor peering at the incoming seafloor pictures, making rough notes about the presence of corals and fish. Next to me Jos� Vitoria is sitting with a box with joy sticks. He controls the winch and tries to keep the camera at a distance of 2-3 m from the seafloor. As the ship is slowly drifting over Galway Mound and drags the camera along, it is not an easy task for Jos� to keep the hopper at the right distance, because the pictures come with some delay and it is difficult to predict if the bottom is going down or up. He has some help, however, from the two lasers that are also attached to the hopper. The two laser beams are 30 cm apart and parallel to each other, and show as 2 green dots on the pictures. If the hopper is coming closer to the bottom the distance between the 2 laser points becomes optically larger. So Jos� eyes are fixed at these two moving green dots. A hopper of two hours can therefore be very tiring for the eyes! But the result is rewarding. We see lots of blue-white fingerlike sponges, lots of orange corals, carrier crabs holding a piece of coral above their carapace for protection, and some monkfishes. The funniest moment is when a shark suddenly moves in and attacks one of the laser dots. After lunch we do two boxcores, which means taken undisturbed bottom samples. Both are successful, and come from the area between the coralmounds and the continental slope. The surface of one of the cores is literally covered with so called dropstones. This is not because they have a black colour (in Dutch "drop" is a very popular black salt-sweet liquorice), but because they were carried away by icebergs long ago from northern countries to be "dropped" here when the iceberg melted away. We end the day by recovering two landers and doing a hopper transect over the Poseidon Mound. Marc Lavaleye