64PE365 - Dag 2

First day of measurements...

Today at 8 o’clock Dutch time the first session of real measurement has started, although a pretty relaxed one. This consists in a CTD station every half an hour, and a CTD + LISST + filtering station every 2 and a half hour. In the meanwhile, current measurements are also performed thanks to an ADCP attached to an external pole on the board side of the ship. The session will go on til tonight at 22.

ADCP attached on the pole at board side of the ship, ready to go in the water.	ADCP in the water!

From satellite pictures, we can see that we are entering the East Anglia Plume from South East, therefore our filters are getting dirtier and dirtier while steaming northward (and the transmissiometer is confirming this quite nicely!).
No little jellyfish nor other strange stuff has been fished so far in the Niskin bottles, but the cruise has still a long way to go. Filtering activity and water storage for further analysis onshore is proceeding well, the only sampled we had to remeasure so far has been...the first one!
Well, with such a start, it can only go better.

After the morning coffee break, we had our emergency drill test (as announced yesterday): after hearing the “abandon the ship” alarm (.......-) we all had to go in our cabin, grab our survival suit and life jacket, and meet at our master station on the C-deck.
We all gather quickly and next to the correct life raft: we didn’t attend the “survival at sea" course in Den Helder in vain.

Three different filtering frames for three different purposes:
physics (sediment amount and size)	biogeochemistry (organic components)	optics (chlorophyll and dissolved organic matter)

 While the CTD is scanning the water column from within, optical measurements are also performed to investigate one of the most visible properties of the sea surface: its colour!
Unfortunately in the afternoon waves started getting higher and shaking our ship in such a way Secchi disk measurements got quite complicated: one moment your disk is two meter below water, and immediately after your disk is flying in the air or hiding below the ship.
However, some good estimations are still possible, you just have to be patient enough and get synchronised with the sea, up and down, up and down, up and down...
An amazing thing is that we could actually see the sea colour changing while entering the plume, since we went from an almost clear blue to a more brownish colour in few stations (6 to 8 in FU scale).
The last colour measurement is done around 18.00, since later there will not be enough light to measure it properly, right on time for dinner: Frikandel and/or vegetarian croquette.
For a foreigner on a Dutch ship, even a dinner can be an interesting, educational and cultural experience!

After dinner, the first scientific meeting was held: first measurements look nice!

“The miracle of the day”
The pump for BGC filtering stop working yesterday, exactly one hour after leaving the harbour. Even after several attempts, a team of internationally renown scientists didn’t succeed in fixing it.
However, today, wizard Sven just switched it on and off few times and...it worked!
Magic!