Introduction

Participants

 

R/V Pelagia Cruise SME 117 INDUS
	Diary overview
Saturday, 20 December 2008
Saturday has brought a turn of good luck for the team on RV Pelagia. Although the concept of a nice, relaxing weekend break and a lie in bed are far from a reality here in the Arabian Sea the day got off to a good start with the successful completion of bathymetric mapping in the Indus Canyon which we were doing over night. We arrived back at our coring Site Indus-5 after breakfast and made ready the piston core, with a huge 18 m capacity. We did not fill this but got more than 12 metres of sediment when we retrieved it. Cor Stevens won a prize for being the closest guess to the right amount! A case of a favourite refreshing Dutch beverage. We then had a last attempt to retrieve our lost piston corer because the weather had improved. We even managed to snag the device in our grappling hooks before the line snapped and we lost the corer and all the hooks too. Rather a disappointment. Wasting no time we have put our seismic gear back in the water we are now heading west across the Indus Canyon with great hopes that the weather will remain good for us, at least for a couple of days. Our hope now is to run up the shelf close to the city of Karachi. In the meantime 12 m of sediment is beckoning from the lab for description and sampling. Never a dull moment.
Cor and Roger	Smiles around the core