Success!

The 2 dives were a great success, the first real sea-floor surveys made with PICASSO since it started functioning, about 2 years ago. Even the second dive went well, even though the fiber-optics cable didn’t unroll as it should have done. Luckily they have 2 coils, one inside PICASSO and the other on the ship. That problem has already been solved before tomorrow’s dive. I have gotten the hang of the pre-dive checks now. As it’s technically only the biologists doing the dives we are kind of lacking people and so I helped out screwing the tops on and such to go faster. We would like the pre-dive check to go from an hour and a half to less than an hour.

The driving of PICASSO is very tiring, but Dhugal is getting very good at it, and never even touched the bottom on the second dive. They have also gotten the hang of the camera’s zoom and focus, and got some good footage of sea anemones, some siphonophore bells, some shrimp and fish and the billions of star fish (brittle stars?) that live on the sea-floor. We don’t reall know why there are so many, but there is lots of detritus in the bay, and they may be able to catch small preys from the water. We have not had the opportunity to look closely at the videos, as the engineers are still fiddling around with stuff in the container. Hopefully tomorrow we can go through some. We only have a dive in the morning, and then the laser group takes over in the afternoon.

At the end of the second dive I had time to do a small surface plankton net, to keep myself busy. There were lots of jellyfish this time. Mostly siphonophore bells, but also some Obelia medusae. And lots of small fish larvae, either sardines or anchovy. We had a go looking at them under polarized light and it’s amazing what the muscle bands look like. Jellyfish are, of course, completely invisible. But it was still fun playing around with.

Also in the lab is a porcupine fish that the people on the small boat brought back when they went to take James Reimer to the port. It’s not looking great, and we don’t really have anything to feed it, but we’ll try and keep it happy enough untill we get back to JAMSTEC. We gave it fresh water today and it seemed to be happy enough.

A restful night for everyone, as it was an eventful day.