A day in the life..

So this cruise is going like so...

I roll out of my bunk around 12:30 pm. Eat whatever leftovers of lunch is around.. perhaps a bowl of cereal if there is nothing of interest / vegetarian. Then I sit around.. read.. browse the interwebs.. write my paper (soon).. study for the GREs (soon). Around 3 or so I decide it's time to get my work out on. So I row and run for about 40 minutes. Treadmills on a ship are not so easy. Definitely increases the calorie burn when you're trying to not faceplant. Then I do that shower thing and then it's dinner time! Dinner is served, a buffet style of salad and stuff. Pasta, grilled veggies, some meat stuff I don't notice because I don't eat it, rarely fish, we're not really catching anything edible, most unfortunately. I... might dare to say I miss scallops. Might.

So then my watch starts at six. We usually start by deploying a CTD but, the hydraulics on the crane broke this morning so... we'll see if we keep doing that. Pity because my entire project is kind of relying on a working CTD to get me water samples... hmm......

When the CTD was working.. it went kind of like this. Open the bottles. Cast it out while trying not to get crushed. Wear hard hat and PFD just in case. Sit in a chair and tell the winch operator to send it down to 1000m. Now bring it up to 200. Now 150. Now 100. Now keep doing that at intervals until I say stop. Cool now lets bring it to the surface and try to not get crushed again. Yaay. Now lets empty the bottles into other bottles that we can bring into the lab. Now lets pour the water in those bottles through little filters. Now lets put those little filters into bottles with 90% acetone in it, or bits of foil. Now lets freeze it at -20. Yeeaaahhh.

Okay, break time, eat some rice, with chopsticks. Get some coffee, make it mocha, with some nesquick.

Now it's time to trawl! Take little time-depth recorders (TDRs) out of their little cases. Hook em up to the computer. Program them. Put them back into their little cases. Put them on the net. Open up a bunch of computer programs spread across four monitors. Watch the net go out. Press buttons. Tell the winch when to stop. Haul some back fifteen minutes later. Stop. Haul some back fifteen minutes later. Stop. Haul some back fifteen minutes later. Stop. Haul the rest back fifteen minutes later. Get the TDRs. Load the data. Help sort some little fish and squid and shrimp! Maybe. If you don't have to do fluorometry.

If you do have to do fluorometry, take the little filters in acetone you froze yesterday and let them warm up. Blank the fluorometer. Mix up the vial with a cool vibrating mixer thingie. Pour into cuvette. Put cuvette into fluorometer. Read the number. Put some 10% hydrochloric acid in the cuvette. Mix with cool vibrating mixer thingie. Put cuvette into fluorometer. Read the number. Repeat ten more times. Get tired of the respirator hurting your nose.

Oh hey look, just in time for you to be done with fluorometry, it's time to do a trawl again!

And then it's bed time.

Ta-daaaa