Sunday, July 27, 2008

Sat at Station B

A hectic few days so i'll make this short, want to catch up on some sleep tonight and go to bed early. We're stuck in bad weather, waiting it out at Station B, our final station of this cruise. Yesterday and last night we did all the things we could do in bad weather, and the weather just got worse (it's 40knots sustained winds and gusts to 50knots), so we're hanging out. We just have 7 mud cores to go and we're done here. There was hope of adding a station further north (by either King George Island or Elephant Island), but that may well be tossed out as we loose time here. 

Station A went really well, I got my larvae going and the experiment went well (I think, I guess we'll find out when it's back to the lab).  I've already got a list of ways to make the expt better on the next cruise, it was hectic trying to get so many larvae together, I basically spent all day just doing my things, which was nice not to have to do mud for a change. I did get a lot of corals, so it was again my Coral Nirvana. 

I still have some live larvae going, though they're getting thrown around now, so not sure how much longer they will linger. I was hoping to get them back to Hawaii, but that might well be out of the question now. Just see how they look when we get back into PA and decide from there whether to pack them up.  

I'm ready to get off the cruise now, partly because i now have what I needed from the cruise, but also people are starting to drive me crazy (and i'm really tired, so it's not hard to do!). Last night there were 3 trawls in a row, all after midnight so I had to get up for each one to collect my corals and anemones that came up. First two went well, third one I climbed back into bed expecting an hour sleep and then to be woken for the trawl. I'd asked to be got up once things were mainly sorted, that way I could just grab the bucket of cnidarians and process. I never got woken up, so when the alarm for 11am went off, I assumed the trawl had failed. Nope, they just forgot to wake me, didn't really bother to sort the trawl so it was left in a bucket in a warm room so no good for DNA (to be honest I think they did it just to fill time as we can't do much else, which is dumb), pulled out some anemones for me, put them in the incubator that is both at 11C (not really all that chilled) and well marked as DO NOT OPEN and duct taped shut, as my larvae expt is running in there and changes in temp will ruin it. Fun thing to wake up to with only 3hrs total sleep that night huh. 

Luckily the RNA part of the expt is finished, so I don't think they entirely ruined it, but it's still a piss off, especially as the particular person who put them in there tried the other day to put stuff in there and I had both said explicitly not to and that it wasn't chilled anyway.

So I'm ready to get out of here.............


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