Hi Everyone,
Today, we finished the moorings, Orkney passage work, and our planned work on the cruise. This was incredibly exciting! Thanks to everyone’s hard work over the past few days, we managed to get all of the moorings and instruments ready for deployment.
When I woke up in the morning we had done two of the final three moorings and were ready to do the final mooring after lunch. This was OP5 and was a surprisingly short mooring, only ~500m. This was a classic end to the cruise work, with huge snowflakes falling, black-browed albatross and petrels overhead, and some cute chinstrap penguins porpoising around the back of the ship trying to get a glance at what we were up to.
In the end the mooring actually only took an hour or so to release from start to finish, although the preparation and clearup afterwards took a bit longer. The rest of the day (after a brief but very well-earned break) was spent cleaning up and preparing instruments to travel. This involved taking the Aquadopps (instruments to measure current), removing their batteries and packing them safely in boxes. This was relatively simple but was quite fiddly in places.
Much more frustrating were the SBE37s (aka microcats, which are essentially temperature and pressure probes). These need to be opened by pulling an end off and then batteries removed and other general cleaning and maintenance done. However, the ends were incredibly hard to pull off. We could normally just about manage by placing the plastic end in the vice and twisting and pulling, but today I had two of the five that I physically could not open even with a huge effort. Thankfully I was able to get some assistance from a friendly crew member and eventually all of the instruments were completed. This tired me out a lot ahead of a very good sleep.
23/01/23
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