Even though we had a bit of a swell, we were able to sample our first station on December 8. Besides a successful deployment of the CTD/Niskin rosette, which collects water throughout the water column, the underway seawater system, and pumps that filter in situ, we also deployed the box and multi corer for sediment. However, our two attempts were not successful, and the “Mud-Team” was quite disappointed. As we were already running a bit late for the deployment of the multinet, which needs to be done during night due to zooplankton migration, Aaron Beck suggested to deploy the multinet first instead of another trial for the box corer. After a 10 hours night shift the “net-team” was finally able to retrieve their samples from the multinet at 7 am on December 9. Ulli Panknin found a shiny Sapphirina copepod in her sample. Beautiful!

In order to see happy faces from the “Mud-team” we decided to deploy the box corer again. New game, new luck! And so it was, we retrieved a sediment sample from the seafloor at 4000 m depths. And to push our luck a bit further, we deployed the box corer a second time, and we were again successful.

Unfortunately, we were not able to deploy the catamaran trawl yet but hope to do so during our 4-day transit to station three. Due to bad weather, we decided to skip our second station and transit directly to station three. Station two will be sampled on our way back to Emden.

Well done – First out of 8 planned stations completed.