Tropical cyclone

So the rumors were true. We do have a massive storm in our path, heading straight for us. It is predicted to reach our location in the middle of next week, with 19 meter waves.
The crew doesn't seem to be overly alarmed, our ship is a big and sturdy one, but if we hit a storm like that things (lab equipment included) would inevitably break and we would not be able to run any experiments on board.
Therefore we will attempt to dodge the worst of it by either heading east, somewhat along our intended route (but then miss out on possible long duration station candidates) or head north to seek shelter at Fiji.
The decision will be made within the two coming days, based on our qPCR data and the physical parameters. I think that if we encounter large abundances of UCYN at our our current location (and the next) we will probably head for Fiji.

Last night I ran a qPCR run on water from the short duration station 7, mostly for testing our new standard dilution series aliquots, since the qPCR data wasn't required at that station. I found vast numbers of UCYNB in the top 10 meters of surface water. I think we might have hit a bloom. Perhaps the coming LD candidates will be similar. We're still fairly low on our beloved DDAs though.