Planning & Partying

Somebody other than us! A fishing boat right on our scheduled coring station...  In a vast ocean, what are the chances?

We are in countdown mode now, and we are doing all the planning for the remaining days. We are supposed to stop on Sunday morning as it will then take us about 5 days of transit to get to the Azores. So we are planning every last minute and trying to save an hour here and there. Saving two hours from some activity means we can get one more gravity core, so it's important, really important. So far we have attempted 30 gravity cores, most of them have been successful, if I remember right only two bounced or fell on their side, but we managed to get something even from them, whether it was the sediment smeared on the outside of the barrel or some gravel caught in the core catcher. If you look at it this way, all our cores have been successful. We have a beautiful bathymetric map and numerous seismic profiles, shallow high-resolution and deeper imaging. 

Cruise planning in the conference room.

There are so many things we'd still like to do here and we could easily spend another month out here. I don't know if our sanity would allow it, because of course we're all getting a bit tired and miss seeing other people. Don't forget, we are all locked up in a boat in the middle of the ocean, there is no getting away from each other. We all pretty much get along, but everyone has their off days, especially when the weather tosses us around so much that we can't get a decent night's sleep, and that has happened a lot! It's still very weird and difficult to get used to how quickly the weather changes!

Riding the waves on the observation deck (aka monkey island).

In my last post I told you we were getting ready for the mid-cruise BBQ. If there is one thing Germans know how to do well, that's BBQ's! Plenty of meat, sausages, fillets, steaks, chicken, salads, and lots and lots of drinking. And how lucky were we that it was also a sunny afternoon! The party started at 17:30 and lasted til 4 am and I never thought I'd be helping with the cleaning, which is what the last people do... The next day was recovery day. We were mapping and doing seismics that requires minimum effort, or actually no effort if everything is running smoothly. It took some people two days to recover really. it was great fun!

Waldi, our cook, preparing the barbie!

Drinking in the sunshine

Eating in the sunshine

And as the rest of the world was celebrating Marty McFly day yesterday it didn't go unnoticed here either. Thanks to Maxlimer we had the english version and watched it in the conference room! Lots of laughter, lots of pistachios, crisps, M&Ms, soda drinks, but no pop-corn unfortunately! As of today even the day Doc and Marty travelled to is in the past :)

Movie night on 21st October 2015 - The day Marty and Doc went to the future!

And there it is, they're travelling 30 years to the future, how old do you feel?