Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 13:45:35 +0000 To: karen@icess.ucsb.edu From: "Sirovic, Ana" Subject: Message 12 February 25 2002, 9:05 66 deg 00.78 S latitude 65 deg 59.93 W longitude (around Pendleton Straits) Air surface temperature: 2.8 degrees C Sea Surface Temperature (SST): 0.6 degrees C Wind speed: 34 knots, 040 degrees Air pressure: 962.4 mBar Good morning! Well, last few days have been quite varied, both in weather and in the activity on the ship. I last left you as we were going to deploy the last WHOI mooring. That was done, as well as a night of dragging for the lost one. The deployment went well, the dragging not so much as they did not find the instrument. (I never pointed out that the WHOI oceanographers actually had replacement instruments to put in for the new moorings. They will be taking the instruments they took out of the ocean back home. So the loss of the instrument did not mean they wouldn't be able to redeploy. We, however, were turning around our instruments. Not getting an instrument back for us meant that we have one less instrument to redeploy.) So, after the dragging, the ship was practically left to us and the marine mammal observers: to find whales and deploy our last 3 instruments. At first, things seemed to be going pretty well. The first zodiac that went out on a pair of humpbacks got one biopsy. Bec, Mark, and Sean were out on that group. Mark is our designated crossbow shooter (being a hunter, he's better than anyone else at hitting the animals) so he goes out every time the zodiac gets launched. (I heard Mark's mom is a regular reader of this journal and was commenting on the lack of mention of Mark: hello Mark's mom! I wasn't intentionally not mentioning him!) That first group of 2 humpbacks was very cooperative, they were just hanging around the zodiac for a long time. Which gave a chance for some good shots, both in pictures and for biopsy. This is important because if the animals seem distressed by the presence of the zodiac, the zodiac moves away and either goes back to the ship or tries its luck on a different group. Maybe an hour after the first zodiac got back to the ship, we saw another group, this time of 5 humpbacks. The zodiac team this time was Deb, Josh, Mark, and I. Deb was the photographer, Josh the driver, Mark the shooter, and I was the notetaker/digital camera shooter. We were around these animals for a while because they split into several groups and we were working our way from group to group. Usually you try to identify all the animals by some characteristic early on (e.g. we had Hook - an animal with a hooked dorsal, Whitestrip - an animal with a white rim along the dorsal, etc.) so that you know who you took a picture of and who got biopsied. This time we managed to get 4 biopsies. But we ended up having to move away from some groups because they were obviously not as happy with us there as one might hope. In any case, it was pretty nice to go out, see the animals up close, get away from the ship for a while, and get so many biopsies. The one not-so-nice thing was their breath -- it really stinks! Whoever thinks whales are cute has obviously never smelled one! I'm sure that would change a few people's minds. Given that pictures don't smell, I figured I could still send you one from the batch I took out while in the zodiac. You can see the blows from the animals (there were 2, the one on the right is the windblown blow from the animal who's back is visible), as well as get a glimpse of an idea for the swell we were dealing with. So that was all our first day. We were moving towards the ice edge and there was a lot of activity. We saw many more groups later on that we didn't launch a zodiac on because the swell was picking up, but there were minkes and humpbacks all over the place, as well as penguins, seals, snow petrels, skuas... The following morning things stopped going well. The wind picked up significantly and the visibility went down. So we deployed one of our instruments in the Bay, but remained pretty idle for most of the day. We started working our way up from Marguerite Bay, along the west side of Adelaide, hoping for shelter is Matha Strait. Yesterday, however, proved to be no better. The passes that we tried to hide in were mostly ice covered and we continued trying to make our way north. At this point we're tucked away behind Renaud Island, the winds are still strong so the deployment of our next instrument is questionable since we're supposed to deploy out on the shelf. We have to be in Palmer Station tomorrow morning so hopefully we'll mange to deploy somewhere before we get to the station. The weather might force us to pick an alternative site, one that will be better protected from the wind where we might actually be able to deploy. Going out to sea, one always needs to have a backup plan and remain flexible, because you never know when the weather will get too bad on you and make it impossible to do the work you planned initially. This is especially true in the Southern Ocean where, besides for the storms that get really bad very often, there is also the ice factor. Currently, we're trying to negotiate both. So wish us luck in the next 24 h! Ana