PICASSO Tansei maru cruise

Just back from another fun week on the Tansei maru, and taking some time off before packing everything up for yet another Tansei cruise in 10 days.

This cruise was all about trying PICASSO out on the Tansei maru, and testing a new size callibration system, so you can actually guess how big objects are by the video, without using the old techniqhe of running over them so you can measure them when they hit the video lense.

Although PICASSO is a beautiful little machine, and it sure looks cool on paper, it has a tendancy to not actually work very well, and so our cruise lived up to what I am now starting to consider the PICASSO optimum: most of the instruments working only half of the time, but never all failing at once.

They did manage to do a bit of work with their callibration system, and did get down to the seafloor and find a few sea urchings and a stalked sponge to measure.

And after a few stressful 'It's bound to surface somewhere over here' moments,

PICASSO was successfully recovered and packed away untill they find time to patch it up enough to be safe to take out again.

As well as the PICASSO project, and t make full use of the ship time (PICASSO can only dive during the day), we had also planned to do plakton net hawls, to help complete my siphonophore collection.

This was more of a success than I had ever hoped for. I had been wanting to do a couple deep tows, and after a few toothing problems, I got 3 buckets brimming with wonderful samples.

There were various deep-sea fish,

This one be a jellyfish-eater!

remains of ctenophores,

jellyfish,

We got this one at the surface with a dipnet while waiting for PICASSO to come back up....

and tousands of beautiful siphonophores, that I cannot wait to study in more detail!

All those thousands of animals of course take a long time to find and identify, and I cannot thank Nanae enough for all her help sorting those 3 bucketfulls. We were working full out as it was (Nanae thought she saw jellyfish in her mis soup the last day) and I could not possibly have gotten even half of it done alone.

Alone is what I will be on the next cruise, though, and I have a feeling it won't be nearly as fun sorting through all that plankton.

Shimoda

They sing April in Paris….

But April in Tokyo is actually very very busy, with cruises to prepare, meetings, poster presentations, and various projects to finish 'by tomorrow'! So it was quite lucky that the hotel I had booked many weeks ago, when my calendar was still empty, happened to fall right at the end of one of the busiest weeks!

Trip was planned to be 100% relaxation, with sun, beach, and huge dinners, and it totally lived up to it’s calling.

The small village where my hotel was.

The huge 'crab special' dinner, followed by an equally large breakfast.

Early on Saturday morning I set out on an Odoriko express from Yokohama to Izukyu-Shimoda, at the tip of Izu peninsula, between Sagami and Suruga Bays. Just 2 hours away from Oppama on the express train, you could easily have been on the other side of the world, so different was the countryside.

Although, naturally, a volcanic island, one tends to forget that on Miura peninsula, as most of the outcrops are sedimentary or clay. In Shimoda, it is basalt, and basalt that had clearly been ejected from a volcano rather forcibly, and not given much of a chance to flow and smooth out. And, in fact, the very tall and steep hills surrounding the city are no more than a collection of volcanic plugs: the magma that consolidated in the volcano chimney now standing exposed after the rest of the volcano has eroded away.

As well as being a little geological treasure, Shimoda is also a historical heritage spot, where you can walk down charming, old 19^th-century cobbled streets,

... and admire models of Commodore Perry’s ‘Black Ships’ chugging around the bay.

But what better, on a warm, sunny spring day than to simply sit down in the shade of a sakura tree and watch the hundreds of birds and insects out and about in the blossoms?