Hi Everyone,
I was lucky today, because almost all of the transit time from M3 to M2 took place while I was asleep and then I woke up in time to watch us drag for the mooring. This is quite a rare process (or so I am told) which involves sailing around the mooring in a roughly 250m radius circle trailing a wire down to the ocean floor (with some weights and grapples on the wire). We then sailed a bit away from the circle and began to winch in the wire which would gradually tighten the circle. The aim of this was then to hit the mooring loose and cause it to come up to the surface. As this was going on, many of us were gathered around the yellow box reporting the depth of the mooring and hoping for the number to go down. A cheer rang out when it did, and everyone started getting ready for the mooring to arrive.
For me, this meant going up on bridge to help look out for it. We were expecting it to be about 250m away but, as the captain said, it didn’t really matter where it appeared so long as it wasn’t right behind the boat as we didn’t want it to get caught in the propeller. As we were watching for it, the weather began to close in, with visibility limited to about a hundred metres or so. We began to get concerned about seeing the mooring. Then, almost inevitably, it popped up right behind the ship! It had become caught on the wire and dragged up behind it. Despite some issues with getting it off the wire, and the precautionary action of turning off the propellers, the mooring was brought onboard safely and we were able to begin turning it around.
I don’t know if this has come across from my previous posts, but I actually haven’t had to spend a huge amount of time on deck for my jobs as they are mostly inside, but today I spent most of the day on deck helping to carry instruments from the mooring into the lab and turn them around. I spent many hours on the floor of the hangar wrestling with some glass spheres used for buoyancy. These are composed of two glass hemispheres which are vacuumed together and then encased in plastic. These are attached at intervals to the mooring to help it spread out and to float up once released. They are actually quite heavy on the ship though, and with even a slight roll, anything spherical that isn’t tied down gets quite frustrating. My job was to switch them onto a new chain and check whether any of the glass was damaged. Although quite a repetitive job, the view more than made up for it, we had a humpback whale who was very interested in the mooring and a huge variety of seabirds from petrels (cape, white, giant and wilson’s storm) to prions and albatross.
Another highlight of the day was while doing the crossword we decided to sit outside as there had been some whale sightings at a distance. As we sat down we saw a minke whale right close to the ship as it slowly swam away from us. We also saw lots of huge blows on the horizon, including some that were synchronised with a large and small one. There were many theories, the blows were the wrong shape for the usual humpback, ranging from blue whales to fin whales to adult blue whale and a baby! However, the eventual conclusion was that they were probably southern right whales which have a double blow of the right form, but you never know……
19/01/23
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