Thousands of words . . . worth of photos

I’m exhausted and going off shift after a 12-hour watch (which wasn’t strenuous, but was boring since we were mostly in transit, not doing science) and after 22 hours awake.  I’m not feeling too witty (or coherent), so I’ll throw some photos up here and count them as thousands of words.

Dolphins played in our starboard wake.

 Obligatory sunset photo.  Regular sea-goers aren’t enchanted.  I am!

Here’s a “rosette” (a suite of instruments) being steadied by people with ropes while it’s lifted and lowered by a winch.  This is the physical oceanographers’ bread and butter (Mammoths: that’s an idiom!)  It has gray bottles all around for sampling water, and some instruments on the inside for measuring temperature, salinity, depth and dissolved gasses.  

Here’s the rosette going into the water.

Here we are getting the bottles ready to go – when they go in, they are open at the top and bottom.  When the rosette is at the right depth, a computer command releases a metal tooth  (they look like spokes on a wheel here, in the center), which “fires” the bottle, closing it at both ends at once.  (This was taken before it was lowered into the water.)