Now we are on our way! – We left Tromsö a little after 5pm yesterday. The first hours of our trip felt almost a bit surreal: With the sun shining and the summer temperatures, surrounded by the beautiful landscapes of fjords and mountains, it felt more like taking vacation on board a cruise ship than being on the way to an Arctic expedition! But since we know that is going to change soon, we used our free evening to relax and “charge our batteries” for the weeks to come: Some of us went to the gym or sauna, and I was spent time with a couple of colleagues sitting on the helipad deck, enjoying the sun, taking pictures of the beautiful landscape, chatting, and knitting or drawing. We stayed up until midnight to take some pictures of the midnight sun – well, except from the time on our watches (strategically held into the picture), there was no real indication that is was midnight...

This night we will get an additional two hours of sleep – we set the clocks to two hours behind (UTC time), where it will remain for the duration of the cruise (we are passing several time zones, but since we don’t go on land anywhere, it makes sense to keep a consistent time zone to facilitate daily routines and have consistent data logging).

Today is mainly about training and sampling organization: we have several “toolbox meetings” with the crew. Here we talk about the practical aspects of our sampling activities – how to use the ship’s infrastructure (like cranes and winches) when taking water and sediment samples, which tasks we can do ourselves and for which we need help from the crew, what safety precautions to take for working in certain areas and in heavy weather conditions etc.There is a meeting for every sampling activity, so people who are involved in several activities are spending quite some time in the meeting room today! Since that is located on the 4th floor, you actually feel ship rolling. (I am wondering if this design is on purpose to keep meetings short?) But we still can’t complain, we had feared high waves and bad weather for the transit, and so far it’s been really smooth! This morning it was even still sunny and warm, but after leaving my last meeting, I suddenly found that the whole outside world had disappeared into a thick fog. So, I am happy to get inside again – this time into the methane lab, where the training continues. The individual members of our team have brought their different equipment for sampling and analysis, and now we are showing each other how to use it and practice the different steps to get some routine because once we get to the first sampling station, we will have to be able to work quickly and efficiently! Because of the shift work it’s also important that we all know how to operate each other’s instruments. Our “sample” for today is just warm water from the tab, but sometime in the next days we will stop the ship and test the equipment with some real seawater and sediment.