I am alone here in the main lab now. Most people are in bed. I have two more hours on my shift. Today and a couple of days ahead we will be at stations where we will be filtering samples, so I have been assigned full time to the “methane team”. I have previously only been helping them out with smaller tasks. I am currently preparing sampling containers for the stations where we aim to take a lot of samples of this type. We are arriving at stations soon that are interesting from a methane source perspective and we will see what we find. It is so interesting. So amazing to actually be here. I gather you might be tired of me saying it now – but I am very taken by the situation we are in – what a rare opportunity this is and the amount of effort being put into all of this. Way to go everyone on board – I cheer you on!

Oh – and another cool thing. Today we were at a semi-deep station, the water depth here was around 370 meters, but we took samples with the Go-Flo bottle (a sampling container that is ultraclean and leak-tight for gases, such as methane). We normally use the “red winch” which only reaches a couple of hundred meters down, but since it is deeper than that we used another winch on the aft. For this one you climb out on the fan tail of the Oden, equipped with a harness, a floater suit (an overall that makes you float in the water if you fall in, and keeps you warm when working a lot on the deck in the cold) and a boat hook. I guided the bottle and weight during deployment and retrieval so it did not swing too much and hit the frame or hull. 

- - - A secure line between me and the big ocean. Horizon 360 degrees. You feel very small...