28 March

Long-Term Ocean Climate Observations (LOCO) – D301/302

Cruise Diary – 28^th March 2006	Sunset
Tuesday - Again a tropical day. Already at 5.30 am when we were busy with redeploying the first mooring on the Madagascar side of the channel, sunshine was stronger than on a hot summer day in Holland. No complaints however. Conditions are ideal for our work. The redeployment of three moorings went very smoothly. These moorings are deployed 'top first'. Thus the floating buoy that gives the buoyancy is deployed first, followed by the long mooring cable with instruments and finally the acoustic releases and the weight. The picture (see below) shows this last part of the mooring. The connection between the weight and the releases will (hopefully) be broken two years from now, when we come back.
Last part of the mooring; The Acoustic Release	During nighttime, when we stay at a stations for a few hours, lights of the Discovery appear to attract a lot of squid (in Dutch: 'inktvis'). This makes Tycho, one of the students on board, go crazy. Already for a few nights he is trying to catch the squid using a ‘fishing rod’ that he could borrow from Lloyd, one of the cooks. However, he did not catch anything till yesterday night. Then Sander showed him how to do this. Within a few minutes he got 3 on deck. After that, Tycho and others caught some 10 more. The cooks prepared them for dinner. Very tasty. I guess there will be many fishermen on deck tonight!