Research Cruise

Breakfast

• Eggs
• Pancakes
• Bacon and sausage
• Fruit salad

Lunch 

• Beef and mushroom stir-fry
• Steamed rice 
• Fried chicken 
• Salad bar 
• Cauliflower 
• Tomato beef soup 

Dinner

• Baked ham 
• Penne pasta 
• Mashed potatoes 
• Gravy 
• Lima beans 
• Butternut squash
• Salad bar 
• Pound cake 

Weather:

Winds out of the West around 29 knots, seas 13-19 ft.

Position:

Steaming to the Cascade seamount, 150 miles due East of Hobart.

The weather looks pretty grim for the next week at least, so to hopefully make up some science, we’re heading out to the Cascade seamount to hopefully get a dive or two in. Since Cascade is more Northeast than our current location, we’re hoping that Tasmania will shelter us from some – but not all – of the bad weather systems heading our way. The captain recently corrected our course, giving us 6 extra hours at Cascade, so we’ll get to squeeze in some swath bathymetry of the dive region on Cascade before the planned dive time. However, the weather will not be perfect, and the chance that we’ll actually do a dive tomorrow is pretty slim. If the weather stays crummy, we’ll head up North some more to the St. Helen’s seamount, which will be more or less completely sheltered by the Tasmanian coast. Although this spot isn’t ideal, it’s mostly uncharted by scientists (but heavily fished). So at the very least we should get some interesting footage from this site, and hopefully collect some corals as well. In the meantime, we’ve all been catching up on reading, movies, and card games; Nele, a German post-doc in Jess’ group taught us “doublehead,” a card game from Northern Germany, and one that probably hasn’t spread too much farther than that – the rules are so complicated!!  After 4 hours of playing we were still confused about the rules!  I’m sure those of us who have learned it will take some sadistic joy in teaching it to our friends and family back home…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 6:39 am by Adam Subhas and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.