St Kilda, Calibrating and finally some nice weather

FINALLY SOME NICE WEATHER!

Yesterday we had to go to St Kilda, in order to wait for the other two participating vessels, because they were a bit too far behind us.
For the blue whiting survey, it is important that all the vessels stay in close proximity to each other, so that we can use the data in the end and realise and the best possible synoptic coverage. In the end we had to chose if we want to continue sailing with 6 knots or go to St Kilda, which was only approximately 1 hour steaming away from us, to let the Irish and Russian come closer to us again. Sailing with 6 miles is not the ideal solution for us though, as we are using a towed body, which will tilt at a certain angle under the water surface if we do not survey at approximately 10 knots. Hence we decided to sail to St Kilda and reschedule the calibration which was planned for after the trip. While the calibration prior to the survey did not work out too well due to harsh conditions, it went very well this time.
The video below shows you how we set up our calibration equipment:

The picture below is an underwater shot of the towed body

 The red circles at the bottom of the towed body are our transducers, the bigger circle is the 38kHz and the smaller one the 120 kHz. On the picture below you can see the towed body hanging along the ship.

 While Eric, Kees, Thomas, Dirk, myself and most of the crew were calibrating, the others went for a small boat trip into a cave, where they could observe a lot of seals and made a few steps onshore, walking up a hill...

TRAWL 9
After the calibration we went straight back to our "business as usual" - surveying...
Back on track, it wasn't for long until we saw the first schools coming up again. We realised another pure blue whiting trawl yesterday late in the evening.

Impressive catch on Tridens

Sometimes you can really be surprised from what kind of creatures you bring up from the deep. Today we had such a moment, the entire crew and all the scientists on board were astonished when we took in our haul this afternoon. We did not see too much fish coming in on the trawl sonars but suddenly the catch sensors announced that the nets were full. When the net came in we found this giant deep sea squid (Todarodes magnaiocus). More on this topic to come as we get some more information about the species and a positive response about its correct identification from the experts back onshore. So for now enjoy a snapshot of our impressive catch!!!

Keep on riding the waves

We are still on track riding the waves, with a continuous wind-force 8 blowing from the southeast. Luckily enough we managed to keep on with our survey work without too many interruptions. Tomorrow or the day afterwards we should finally enter the high pressure area and finally get some nice weather.

Since our last post we did a couple of more trawls which gives us a total of 8 trawls now. After the fifth trawl, our net broke and the crew had to work the entire night to get it fixed again. They did a great job and we were ready to shoot the net the again next morning.

All 3 catches were pure blue whiting trawls, always mixed up with some mesopelagics.

Trawl 6

Trawl 7

Trawl 8

Trawl 9

Our latest trawl was aborted because we had some problems with the winch which we are trying to fix right now...

For those of you who wonder how blue whiting looks like on the conveyor belt have a look at this video:

  

To get an impression of how it looks out here, have a look at the following video which Matthias recorded with his camera mounted above the bridge. As we have winds blowing from the southeast the swell is not too high out here, because it doesn't build up over a vast space as it would, if we would have the "usual" westerly winds. Still wind-force 8 - 9 is strong enough...

 

 Another experiment we did during one of the trawls, was to mount the GoPro camera on a five meter pole and lower it into the water, to have a look at diving gannets, here some frist results, more footage to come as soon as we hiot some nicer weather and do not have to be scared to loose the camera anymore...