Alls well that

We put all the samples in the freezer last night, leaving the remainder of the clean up for this morning and throughout the rest of the day. We have a lot of presumably good samples and will be spending the next few months analyzing them. They should make it easy to establish a baseline in case drilling does in fact begin off the coast. It may be a while before I catch up on sleep between research and catching up on grading of oceanography homework to fullfill my TA duties.

Thanks for reading my blog and I'll keep everyone updated every few weeks on our analysis and prospects for any future cruises I may go on.

Regaining our land legs

I got some sleep and woke up about half an hour out of port. We've got most everything off the boat, making sure it is mostly cleaned up for the next research group that will be taking it out. It's only been a week, but I'm looking forward to getting back to UNC after the roughly four hour drive (and maybe another stop at Wilburs.

Last day for research!

The water column group finished up their sampling yesterday leaving it to us seabedders to finish up all of our sampling before we leave at midnight tonight. I'm essentially doing double duty, so after I finish my lunch of salisbury steak, I'll be going back to processing sediment samples.

Back in the Saddle

Today, the winds dropped and the weather cleared up, so we're back to work like before. We collected 10 cores (both box and Kasten). I'm too busy to update the blog much, but I did take a picture of an atlantic puffin that must have been blown into our area by the storm. Enjoy!

Courtesy blog.thomaslaupstad.com

Stormy waters

I awoke to heavy rain and high winds (about a 6 on the Beaufort scale, which is just short of gale levels). We tried taking some cores, but it quickly became obvious that our cores would mostly pretrigger or bounce off the bottom, making any attempts futile.

We took the day off and spent our time watching DVDs.

In case your interested:
Cape Fear, C
Jaws, A-
Perfect storm, B
Harry Potter, A

The rest of the time was spent tidying up our samples and catching up on sleep.

Shiver me timbers

The wind is starting to pick up meaning larger waves and choppier seas. Some of the cores are pre-triggering from pressure on the lines, but we still had moderate success collecting enough cores to keep me doing something. Problems related to high winds and larger waves also kept the group working on the water column from getting much done.

The barometric pressure is dropping, the sky is cloudy and the forecast for tomorrow doesn't look good. Having good weather for 9 days straight is generally too much to wish for, so I'm not too concerned about having a day of bad weather. Perhaps we'll still get some work done.

The Hustle Group

We played catch-up today taking up most of the winch time for coring. We've got a dozen cores, meaning a lot of processing for me. Luckily, all my good karma from helping others before means that other people are now helping me out.

As I finish this post, I'm already going into tomorrow and am set to go to work in 20 minutes.