…feel sometimes different on the Indian Ocean. (Photo: Folkard Wittrock)

It’s another day of revisiting plans and making lists. In between answering the usual first cruise days questions about where can I find this and that, the water sampling had to be organized. This means deciding which samples are wanted by the individual working groups and can be managed during the simultaneous three hourly underway sampling routine and during the vertical deep casts. Since the first hour of the cruise we managed to investigate twenty biological and chemical parameters in the ocean surface waters in parallel, comprising more than fifty individual compounds. That’s a lot of coordination work for sampling bottles, storage places and scientists taking the samples around the clock, which are all more or less experienced and in a good mood. Also, the first oceanic depth profile, which brings twenty-four deep water samples for even more than those twenty parameters at once on deck, has been successfully managed. Luckily it was not a complete chaos, which sometimes may happen, when ten working groups suddenly appear at once with two hundred sampling bottles on the working deck, trying to obtain water from the twenty-four bottles. With the established routine, the next deep water-sampling today had music again, after the weather smoothed out and allowed the cast. After two days of being tossed around by the waves, I am sitting again in front of the computer, making sample and freight lists and I am happy that I can sit almost upright, do not have to hold on to the desk anymore and celebrate the ships chairs, which manage to partly equalize the ships tossing. I had a short nap after lunch, where I was rolled and pitched around in my bed by the waves again, which make some of us sleepless, while I enjoy the constant movement (-but only when it stays less than during the first two days of SO235). The sudden escape from gravity, when the ship dives into the waves, being exchanged by a sudden heavy load, when the ship emerges again from the ocean, is always again a very unique experience and everybody finds different techniques of walking, sitting, and using the motion  for gymnastic exercises. The weather was announced to get worse again, but we found a merciful angle between the ship’s course to the next station and the wind and waves, since there is a big difference between being gently stirred rather than being battered. After arrival at the exciting station upwind of a coral bank, we stay here for a diurnal cycle, which also gives us a further break from the natural forces.

by Birgit Quack