Big day today! Firt, some bad news, as the bay we were planning to go to has 20 knot winds and so we can’t do anything there. So we went to Suruga bay, just west of Sagami bay. It is deeper, but the shallow bit is closer to land and so more protected on all sides.
All the engineers on board were busy building/repairing : 1. a small plexiglass house for the satellite transmitter they’re testing, 2. one of the LED light for PICASSO, that had been found to be full of mud from the previous cruise, 3. the ARGOS transmitter, so they don’t lose sight of PICASSO. And as well as all that, Dhugal, Jamie and I did some plankton nets off the side of the ship. We did some surface ones first, which were so surface you could have caught flying fish in them. We mainly got all the ocean crud and a bit of phytoplankton. Then we used the deep-sea reel for a more or less vertical plankton net, when the ship had stopped. It took much longer than they had planned, as it always does, but we got some good stuff. I’ve been sorting the jellyfish out of the samples, and last night we looked at some of them.
Another important point of the day was the PICASSO pre-dive check. It was done all officially, with walkie talkies to communicate, even though everyone was either right inside or right outside the container. They found some interesting glitches, but nothing very wrong. You just need to remember that the “release ballast” actually magnetizes it, while the “magnetize ballast” releases it...
Last night we put down the anchor in a small bay on the side of Suruga bay, where the JAMSTEC deep-sea foring vessel is already ported. Everyone got to take photos, and some photos of Mt Fuji too, that you could just glimpse though the clouds at times.
It was a fun day, and went by really fast. Today, we have the shallow water PICASSO test, in “ROV but tied with a rope to the ship” mode. At the same time we will have the satellite being tested on the top of the ship, and then the laser communication system tested in parallel with PICASSO this afternoon. And I still have a bit of plankton to sort through if ever I get bored.
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