Thursday 9 February 2012

Survey planning

Out at sea the best laid plans can sometimes go out of the window as we are at the mercy of the weather. We've now only got one more station left to go before moving on from North of Celtic Deep and so Paul and Sue (the Cefas scientists in charge of the cruise) have been trying to work out which site we should be heading to next. From looking at the forecast it seems we have a good weather window coming up and so should be able to get out to sites further offshore. This has to be balanced with the fact that in the middle of next week we're scheduled back into port for a crew change and so don't want to waste too much time steaming to a site a long way away if we're going to have to then travel the whole distance back again to get back into port.

The large scale maps of the sites that we have up on the wall in the dry lab to help with survey planning


And so, the final decision on the next site we'll be heading to is... East of Haig Fras, which should be around about a 7 hour steam from where we are.