Well, the station yesterday started one and a half hours before the dinner... and of course, this station had elevated methane levels, just enough to perform a GoFlo cast. But we still made it just in time for the dinner, I even managed to run up to  exchange the work clothes for my dress. First, I have a bit trouble to get into a festive mood, my thoughts are still at the station and the sample that is left to process... but then I just enjoy the excellent food (the best breakfast I had in days!) and calm down a little. And as we learn that there is no next station before breakfast tomorrow morning (change of cruise plan due to a problem with the CTD), we can really celebrate a bit! Almost everyone manages to join at least for a bit – the poor CTD team leaves directly after dinner to fix the CTD overnight (successfully), and the multibeam team and of course part of the crew can’t leave their post... By the way, I was right in not believing that we are halfway through the cruise – we aren’t yet! There is still a few days missing to the middle, but the crew had thought it might be a good time to celebrate, since we finished an intensive part of our cruise, and are just in an not-so-intensive part, at least most of us. And it is a good decision, it’s good to take the time to actually reflect and enjoy what we have accomplished, and get some energy for the days to come. After the dinner, there is some mingling in the lounge room, chatting, seeing some people one hasn’t seen for days because we have been on opposite shifts, catching up how everyone’s work has been going in the last days. Some people turn in early after that, some hang out until late, and at some point there is even a bit of music – Marcus is playing the clarinet (with only a few bad tones, as he has gotten some seawater in his instrument the day before). The night-shift people hang out a bit longer, or go back to the labs in between – I recruit a few people to get my before-dinner water sample up to the lab, using our “beerkeg elevator”. I start “stripping” of the sample and prepare a few things for the next day in the lab, and Emma joins me to finish off some things on her side of the lab, both still in our dinner dress.

The last station before the dinner was already the last one of our third subsection of the cruise, and now we are on our way for the second outer shelf– slope–rise transect. Like the first transect, we have deeper stations here, so everything at stations takes a bit longer – 1–2 hours for the CTD to get up and down, same time for the multicorer for sediment. In between stations, there is some surveying of canyons ongoing, so for us things go a bit slower. We use the time to do some things that require a moment of thinking or the ship standing for a while: coming up with a plan for the time we run out of liquid nitrogen – we have only one cryocooler for both “water stripping” (main lab, second floor) and “air stripping” (fourth floor”) – so where to locate the cooler? The air line goes to the 4th floor, the stripping boards are easy to transport, but what about all these beerkegs with samples?  The other thing we do today is flame-sealing some glass tubes with CO2 samples from our stripping – not a thing to be done in a rush, in a crowded lab and during moving.

Again, we are in an area from which very little data exists, so we are keeping our eyes open for interesting things to see! For our workpackage, it is looking for slope hydrates, and also to check from where on we get signals of the methane plume coming from the shelf. Every quick analysis of the methane profile is thus a moment of anticipation – will we see elevated methane levels or not? This night we completed 3 stations, and every time the “methane night crew” gathers around the screen when the quick GC-analysis is coming to an end... including our again recruited temporary member Emma. She is really hoping for high signals – not only for scientific reasons, but because she loves to work with the GoFlo, especially at deeper stations. Since our normal winch has only a 250m wire, GoFlo casts at higher depths need to be done from the aft deck, where usually the sediment work is performed. This is a totally different setup – using the large A-frame instead of the small winch, dressed up in a full harness (see the picture of Emma helping us last time in her blog). And while I get a bit stressed by the thought of the extra organizational effort of this deep-water sampling, Emma just loves it. Unfortunately for her, we don’t see high enough methane levels for a GoFlo cast, and now we are getting into shallower water again... and the methane levels are rising, so I guess, Emma will have her GoFlo chance soon, even if it’s just from the small winch! Now we are almost back on the shelf, so we will see what exciting things await us there... but for now, I am off to sleep, looking forward what the other shift has to tell when I am back in the afternoon.