First days at sea

The first night on the ship was spent while still being moored in port. Me and my cabin mate's cabin was freezing because we couldn't find our thermostat. Stupid. Terrible night.
The following morning we set out from Honolulu on our half day transit to station ALOHA. Of course this time was filled with the regular safety instructions, drills, exploring the ship and signing our lives away (legal paperwork, thanks USA, sigh). We also had a science meeting just to go through the coming week.

The rest of the day was just full of preparations for the coming day and lots of good food in between. I was on the team responsible for setting up and deploying the sediment traps. These traps are nothing more than long plastic tubes which are designed to catch sinking particles in the water column at various depths. To keep the caught particles in the traps we filled them up with high salinity water and a preservative chemical.
It was a very mixed work-load which involved chemical preparation, pipetting, filtration and finally deploying the sediment traps by help of a crane, 1 km of rope, a dozen floats and a buoy. Since the last part of the work was conducted at back deck, it involved a lot more practical, hands on work where life vest and hard hat was required.

The second day started relatively late, at 09.00 where we sampled the third CTD (the water collector which is lowered down to a pre-set depth to collect water on its way up while also continuously measuring parameters like e.g. oxygen and fluorescence) of the day.
Since we will always be assisted by senior scientists on the course during our sampling and methodology, there is already a set routine and everything ran very smooth. We filtered water and stored away samples in the -20 freezer for e.g. ATP (adenosine tri-phosphate, which is the "energy currency" of all living cells), phosphorus, nitrate, and POC (particulate organic carbon).
So it was quick work and we were done by dinner, which was good for next up was the CTD or deck work which started at 2.30 the following night.

So the third day was an early one and I treated myself to a very early breakfast which honestly did wonders to everything but my mood this morning. I just couldn't fall asleep as early as I should have. We prepared the CTD, including loading the niskin bottles (so they can later be fired in the water column to enclose water from a certain depth), setting up the software for monitoring and recording the operation and putting out ropes for safely guiding the CTD in and out of the water when it is being deployed using a crane. Finally we also instructed the crane operator via radio as where to stop the CTD to fire niskin bottles and then helped recover the CTD when back at the surface.

All in all, very practical work which usually took an hour to one and a half. That meant that we had some time between CTD deployments (every third hour) and also when it was in the water (unless you were monitoring the operation and firing niskin bottles).
This down-time became a bit tedious at the end of the day but at least we stayed productive by decorating styrofoam cups. These cups will be submerged together with the CTD on the last day (purely for fun) when there will be a 4000 meter cast.
With that said you can all try and figure out what will happen with the cups during that operation. I will post the result at the end of the cruise.