Introduction

Participants

 

R/V Pelagia Cruise SME 117 INDUS
	Diary overview
Tuesday, 23 December 2008	Bert on the bridge
Tuesday has been another quiet, even sleepy day on RV Pelagia. We are almost reaching the top NW corner of our survey area and are getting ready to do some coring after the geophysical work has been completed, at least for a few days, starting tomorrow morning. No doubt we shall have lots of mud to deal with tomorrow, but today we could be clean, monitor the computers and take a little break in the sun.
The day has not been without incident however. In the early hours of the morning we had to be careful not to get caught up in the survey of another, rather larger ship, which is performing an advanced 3D survey for oil companies in the same region. It was a chance to see how the other half live, as their ship had two attendant boats to help keep fishermen away from their seismic streamer, which is a huge 6 km or so long. Ours in comparison is just 100 m or so and we have to avoid the fishing nets by ourow cunning and manoeuvre. Ironically it seems that one of our team's former students was even on that ship. Truly it is a small world! Later in the morning we slowed up a little and did some maintenance on our gear. It turned out that our "Sparker" system was finding life being dragged through the Indian Ocean rather hard work. Fortunately with a little tender care and a lot of yellow tape, we were able to make it good and were soon again underway. We have been lucky with a nice warm day and super flat seas, almost like a lake, which is ideal for our work. It seems especially unfortunately therefore that Orji Akaa one of the Aberdeen representatives is still suffering a little from seasickness and was unable to enjoy our excellent lunch. We hope for good health both for Orji and the seismic tomorrow.