Science team with Argo float

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Crew ready to deploy Argo float 

From: Graham Quartly
Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2007 04:02
Subject: Drake's progress

Cold greetings to you all.
I thought I'd let you know how the cruise is going - at last something more than penguins and pubs in Stanley.

On the whole things are going well. We had a shallow test CTD a few hours after leaving port (actually immediately after the fire drill) and then the watches and underway checking and sampling started, with the proper deep test 10 hours later. All my previous cruises have involved 2 or 3 days sailing to reach the research area, so giving plenty of time to switch into shifts.

The CTD operations have been going smoothly, with the army of novice bottle cockers still managing a 100% success rate on sample collection. The usual collection of polystyrene cups went down on the deep cast (4800m). Marko, who was in charge of that one, said that prior to this cruise his deepest CTD was only 250m, but that's the Adriatic for you.

We have just launched our first ARGO float. This didn't get as much of an audience as the deep CTD, which included one of the artists in residence filming its return to the surface.

Here's hoping for a white Christmas (but when we're back in the UK that is).

Graham