So this first day of sampling was very hectic, but we managed to get everything done before dinner and made the qPCR (quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction) in 4 hours.
To increase our efficiency for next short duration station (SD) we decided to do new dilutions and aliquots of our primers and probes after dinner, so it all concluded with a 15 hour workday and bed at 22.30.
Next SD will be tomorrow morning already and we decided upon a few slight changes for it. We will slightly dilute our standards (by 1:10), set up another pump for sample water filtration and to do a quick survey of the surface water using microscopy to decide on the amount of microscopy samples that day.
So the full day comprised of microscopy of surface water, water collection from a CTD rosette (as seen above), filtration followed by immediate DNA extraction, qPCR and calculations for the UCYN targets. Meanwhile we stored the water for our thesis samples in the incubators on front deck, so they would stay fresh and unaltered, and then filtered them after running the qPCR.
So from those bottles we gathered DNA samples and microscopy samples, flash freezing the DNA samples in liquid nitrogen and storing them in -80 degrees celsius for analysis back home. The microscopy samples were simply stored in -20 degrees celsius.
After such a long workday there weren't much time for anything during the evening, nor did I have the energy to. So I simply went to bed and wrote a couple of pages in my journal.
I got the Facebook messenger to work on my computer so I could exchange a few sweet messages with my fiancée during the afternoon and early evening, which was nice. It made me feel a lot better after a long day. I fell asleep wishing I could give her a great long hug at that very moment.
Finally, here's a taste of a tropical sunset at sea. A "sailor's TV". I have a whole timeserie of these pictures with differing shapes and colours of the sky.
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