Stressful plans

Did I ever mention that we often have change of plans on board? I have a strong feeling I did, more than once. So this post might not come as a surprise. Almost immediately after my last post on the subject of downtime I was reached by the news that we would have an improvised short duration station (SD) 14 at midnight, only using a single CTD cast for everyone interested. Imagine the craze following when 20 scientists more or less battled for their tight water budgets from the CTD rosette.

The purpose of this extremely short SD, where we litteraly just stopped 45 minutes to lower the CTD and get it back up again before setting out for Niue, was to get a picture of the water column in a suggested ultra-oligotrophic area just outside of the large phytoplankton bloom. This site could, depending on the results of the quick survey, become our next and final long duration station (LD).

Extremely local rain cloud on the shores of the small island nation of Niue.

Naturally, when such decisions are to be made, me and my colleague were asked to run the qPCR. This made our water demands a lot easier at least. Concerning pros and cons for this site, our data was more or less the only parameter that could tip the scale in favor of coming back after leaving the injured crewmember at Niue. The chief scientist was hoping to find a UCYN bloom for our final LD, since we missed out on a great opportunity south of Fiji due to the massive tropical cyclone.

So we got our water at midnight and ran the qPCR for half the night and in the end it gave us a clear answer: We are not coming back. The filters were almost empty of anything photosynthesising but we did have quite a few UCYN still. Problem was that their abundance was still half of the LD threshold.

Next morning's meeting concluded that we will keep heading east and initiate the final LD within a large cyclonic eddie in the ultra-oligotrophic (dark blue, remember?) open ocean a few days transit from Tahiti.

Now we have another problem. We are running out of time due to numerous delays out of our control. We will not have time for any more SD's and just barely enough time for a full LD. However, there are conflicting information about the time required for transit to Tahiti. The reason for this is that we have also encountered strong easterly winds that slow us down, typical.

I'm wondering if there is anything else that nature and Murphy can throw at us.