Two months in Antarctic seas: 23.02.2013 - First sampling in the Bransfield Strait

23.02.2013 (Saturday). Bad night, possibly because the ship is rolling quite a lot in the true open sea, and certainly because I had bad dreams. When I wake up, I see that the sky is cloudy again. Mid-sized waves cross the sea. No more land, no more icebergs (at least for the time being), only the sea. Our stations north and west of the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula are now a closed chapter. From today onwards we will be sampling in the Bransfield Strait and at the end of the cruise we are supposed to work in the Drake passage, north of the South Shetland Islands. So, today first station in the Bransfield Strait: Bransfield East, slope, station 192. We should have started the trawling operations in the morning but due to technical problems with other gears used before, it was postponed early in the afternoon. I go on deck with the GOPRO camera. It is not cold for Antarctica (a few degrees above 0°C). When the Agassiz trawl comes on board, it appears that the bag of the net has turned over and is now stuck into the frame. Yet during the short time, when it worked, it has collected interesting organisms for us: Eusirus perdentatus sensu lato ('marbled form' and the larger 'spotted form') and three species of Epimeria: E. macrodonta sensu stricto, Epimeria similis and Epimeria aff. similis (again a probably undescribed species already found during previous cruises). Despite I am still disappointed by the GOPRO, I get acceptable video footages of the work on deck. Since the first trawling operation did not work properly due to the net twisting, it is replicated. The second trawling yields more or less the same crustaceans than during the first one. After that we use the dredge. An immature chinstrap pinguin is swimming aroung the wire of the dredge when it is hauled up. We get a sample of black muddy sand. Only small-sized amphipods and not so many, but yet species not found so far during the cruise like Lepedipecreoides xenopus and Tiron antarcticus. It appears that for an unknown but miraculous reason, the piece of my macro objective, which had become disfunctional for days (something in the image stabilizer, I think), unlocked and the objective works again properly. I am more than happy because for days this camera problem had badly affected my mood. Tomorrow, the trawl will be put in the water at 06:00. So the night will be rather short for me.

(Cédric)