23.01.2013 - Seasick

23.01.2013 (Wednesday). Sky cloudy. Sea wavy. In the morning, the Polarstern navigates along the west side of the Tierra del Fuego. Objective: reaching Joinville Island in three or four days. The ship is seriously pitching and I get seasick. My colleague of cabin too. Marie seems to have no such problems. For many scientists, seasickness is a very unpleasant fatality of oceanographic cruises. It can be very debilitating. Normally in a few days, I should be OK (the Polarstern is a very stable ship). The good point is that most of the installation of the lab was done before I get seasick, when the ship was moored in Punta Arenas. Only minor things still have to be modified in our installation. After discussion by e-mail with colleagues in Belgium, I inform Olaf Ziemann that his team may saw and re-solder the lander. They tell me that they intend to do this tomorrow. At 16:15, we have a an appointment concerning the chemicals. Two of our bottles of absolute alcohol are removed from the container of dangerous goods (located outside, at the top of the ship) and brought to our dry lab. The rest of our alcohol stays in the container for the time being. At 18:00 we have a meeting with Dorte Janussen and Julian Gutt concerning the sorting of the benthos sample from the Agassiz trawl. We will work at the NW of the Antarctic Peninsula. For each benthic core station, all gears for benthos studies will be deployed and samples will be collected at two depths. For each station, a subsample of 50 kg will be thoroughly examined for a study of biocoenoses, with identifications of organisms as detailed as possible. The rest of the sample will be studied by individual scientists at their best personal convenience. In the evening we enter into the Drake passage. I continue the installation of our dry lab (one big box has to be moved from the big wet lab to the small dry lab). At that time I am already less suffering from seasickness than a few hours ago. Let's hope it will continue to improve.

At sea, everything has to be fastened.

(Cédric)

I go out on the deck in the morning. The weather is still sunny, very pleasant. We are still west of South Patagonia, but we can’t see land anymore. Everything’s opaque dark blue. We can see impressive birds flying around from time to time, such as the huge albatross. And some people already spotted whales from far away, but I missed them. 

I go on my computer to work, hoping to not get seasick from concentrating too long with this movement of the boat, but I don’t feel any symptoms for now. Many people are showing up with the patch medicine behind the ear, or not showing up at all …

In the afternoon, we have a meeting with all the benthos people to organize the use of the Agassiz Trawl. There is some planning to do beforehand to make sure that every group gets its samples in good conditions for the particular studies he intends to do. We first will take photographs of the whole catch, then a subsample of 50kg will be taken randomly for a biocoenose’s study. We will estimate the proportional biomass of every class of organisms and then each group will collect its samples of interest.  

In the evening, we have the traditional scientists meeting with the presentation of the weather forecast by the meteorologist and the planning of the scientific work. The sea will probably get rougher by Friday. In the meantime, we entered the Drake Passage and truly began our crossing towards the Southern Ocean. We should get to the west of Joinville Island, at the top of the Antarctic peninsula, by Friday evening. 

(Marie)