Some of the small fish that (used to) live near the ship.
The CTD being deployed (I am on the tagline in the middle, cleated out of the frame)
This week was the next BATS cruise – the same routine and practiced mission that I went on in my first cruise. We started out with CTD casts along an ocean acidification transect, and eventually made it to the BATS station itself. We also recovered all three small gliders, and one of the large gliders. Then, we attached one of the small gliders to the CTD by lifting it up with the winch, so that it can be calibrated on a cast.
During this cruise, I tried to work on improving my deck handing during back deck operations and visualize how I might lead the operation. Timing the winches and a-frame apparently gets much easier with time. The common deck operation during this cruise is McLane pumps, and plankton net tows. Marine techs are responsible for relaying to the bridge the angle of the line if they cant see it, and for leading the winch and a-frame operators.
I also started working on a project with a Campbell Science 1000 datalogger. I downloaded new software and set up the logger so that it is ready to take instruments. Then, I wired a temp and humidity sensor into the analog pins and wrote the appropriate code in CRBasic to set up logging. This project was really cool, because it was a lot like the Arduino I had been using in past weeks but was a real application. I also finally finished inventorying and organizing the spare cables which felt very rewarding to finally be done.