26 March

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

Cruise Diary – 26^th March 2006	The CTD frame Thus, during the whole night quite a number of people are involved with this. In the morning we tried to release the fifth mooring. This was a frustrating experience since releasing went smoothly but the mooring did not come to the surface. After waiting and watching for an hour or so, we decided to locate the position of the releases on the seafloor exactly by determining the distance to the ship from some locations around it ('kruispeiling' in Dutch). Meanwhile of course hoping that we would see it on the surface.
Sunday - A hot, tropical day. No wind, a sea like a mirror with only a very long swell, and both air and water temperatures above 30 degrees. During the night the CTD crew was busy with doing 2 stations. At a CTD station a frame (see picture) is lowered from the sea surface to the seafloor. Sensors measure all kind of parameters like temperature, salinity, oxygen content and currents. Data are sent through the cable to the ship and are shown immediately on a screen. On it's way up bottles (gray cylinders) are closed at desired depths. They take water from these depths to the ship. Once on deck, samples from these bottles are used to determine parameters that can not be measured directly with sensors. Karel Bakker measures nutrients from these bottles, Socratis is looking for diatoms and Graham and his team are interested in pigments.
Work at deck during mooring recovery
However, it did not come. At the end of the morning we decided to continue with the original schedule and in the afternoon the sixth mooring was recovered successfully. If the sixth mooring does not come to the surface 'spontaneously' and starts transmitting it's position via the satellite, we will try to catch it by dragging later in the week It should come on deck!