Croissant day

It has been two eventful days with a lot of different things going on. Both research wise and not, both immediately concerning my work on board and not.

Either way I might just start out with the things not concerning my research for a change.

As the title says we have a weekly day referred to as croissant day, which happens every sunday. That is also the only way for me to actually know there will be the start of a new week the following day. Anyway, this day we have croissants to eat at every meal of the day, and the bottled red wine (instead of the regular bag-in-box) is served all day too.

As I've previously mentioned I'm not much of a wine drinker but chocolate croissants, yes please! However, I've been told that apparently these aren't good enough for people from Paris. Spoiled French. Whatever. More for me, yay!

The following day marked the end of sampling for this first long duration station (LD), which feels good. It seems that some people have gotten off work earlier though since something reassembling a crude pool turned up on front deck. Beggars can't be choosers, right? So naturally I found myself just hoping they will finish it before we get to Tahiti. Oh, and I also managed to drop a full tray of food on myself at dinner (including a bowl of soup). Don't ask how, because I don't know. I was just in a big hurry to get back to my sampling, typical, and then I had to clean myself up in addition. Previously when someone dropped something there has been a round of applause throughout the cantina, however, after I yelled out a line of less than appropriate words in Swedish at my misfortune, the cantina went dead silent. I'm not sure what would have been worse, the silence or the applause. At least they should all know by now that I'm not American.

The morning of the final day of this LD I was supposed to sample a depth profile from the CTD for use in another, although minor, experiment of mine again involving spiking with 15N2, 13C and filtering for SIMS analysis. But first my bottles needed to be filled, spiked and incubated for 12 hours of light.

I got up at 03.00 to get all set for this experiment, and had decided before hand with the diazotroph team that we would run this experiment together, so once again they would provide me with the 15N2 and 13C while also measuring the bulk nitrogen fixation.

The CTD went down at 03.10. Only me, my colleague, the crane operators and the flying fish being awake. The CTD came back up at 03.45. Still no diazotroph team around. What the hell?

At least there was one more person at the CTD by now who instinctively ran over to one of the cabins of the missing people only to come back with the unimpressive reply that they have their own CTD at 04.00 since they need so much water. God damn it!

Now there are several things wrong with this unfolding early morning so lets just pause there and take it from the beginning.

On the first day of this LD I had a chat with the leading scientist of the diazotroph team and we planned both our schedules so we would be sampling together on the day of the nutrient amendments experiment as well as the depth profile. Mostly since we are both interesting in collaborating now and in the future as well as for me to avoid wasting time and effort running my own bulk samples. On an earlier agreement with my supervisor they are also always providing the 15N2 and 13C since we had some difficulties getting ours delivered to the ship in time.

Anyway, after deciding on our mutual sampling days I went to the cruise organiser to schedule myself and my colleague on the appropriate CTD's during the five days of LD (specifically sampling from the same CTD's as the diazotroph team at two occasions then. At that time there was no mention whatsoever about an extra CTD at 04.00.

The reason is simple. The 03.00 CTD won't be ready for another go until earliest 04.30. The schedule for my CTD also still said that the diazotroph team would be sampling with me.

With that said, we are back at the unimpressive reply which had me, certainly not being a morning person, play out all of my frustration at one go (sorry once more technical personnel), picturing my whole experiment going to hell and getting up at 03.00 for nothing.

Me and my colleague sampled our water anyway and then stored them away in the blue incubators on front deck, for possible use later. 

Sometime after 04.30 part of the diazotroph team merrily entered the lab while whistling and laughing happily. I seized the opportunity and told them of my morning. At least they stopped whistling. They sampled from their CTD and prepared their bottles for incubation using the mooring. To speed things up I helped out as best I could and finally, two and a half hours late, I got my bottles spiked and ready for incubation. After that, karma struck. While we were working on the mooring before grabbing the rest of their samples off the CTD someone had emptied it. I swear it wasn't me.