Hi, my name is Flippy; and me and my buddies have been following this ship for weeks now, but it is still confusing us. What are these people doing? As a young and unexperienced bird of the high seas we learned that it is great to follow these floating metal things, ships they call them. There are the really big ones with all the blocks on them. They are pretty fast and churn up the waters nicely so that we get a lot of fish out of it. Then there are these other big ones which are filled with lots of people, mostly the old ones. Those are great too as they continuously feed us with all kind of exotics. And then of course the small ones, which are great as they do the fishing for us, cut it all up and serve it to us.

That’s me, these people keep trying to make pictures of me 🙂 ! © Gastón Manta

But this ship, RV Meteor, is so confusing. Most of the time it just drives in a straight line, but it is not really fast enough to mix up the water. We do see the people on it, but they are not throwing anything to us, they must keep their leftovers on the ship. Every now and then we see a few of them coming to the back of the ship and in the beginning we thought that finally we would be served. They actually do throw things into the water, sometimes it just sinks and sometimes they pull it back in again. It looks like fishing but they have never caught anything, so I am not sure what they want. Sometimes the ship just stops somewhere in the middle of the sea or even goes back the way they came. We have no idea why you should stop on such a particular place, but they keep doing it! And then more strange things are happening. It looks again like they are fishing but how many fish can you catch with such small nets?! No wonder that there are never any leftovers for us in it. They seem to get the idea that something is wrong because they keep trying it several times on the same spot. There is also this thing they let down into the water, but can it be true that they are fishing for water? And then later they throw the water back into the sea!

Something they drop into the water and then just let it go. © Jeroen Groeneveld

A device to fish for water. © Jeroen Groeneveld

How can you catch fish with such a small net? © Jeroen Groeneveld

They only good thing for now is that at least we have a good internet connection when we stay close to the ship. So we had a chance to find an explanation for what is going on here. Apparently this ship is filled with scientists. It is a particular species of people with often strange ideas. Well….that is definitely true! But I really hope that on my next trip I just get back to regular business. Being confused is interesting for a while but in the end I just want some fresh tasty fish. So that’s it for this entry; I hope I have given you an impression from a different perspective and wish you all a lot of success!

Cheers, Flippy and friends.

PS. Floppy just said that we could help them a bit doing some real fishing and dropping them on the deck.