Research cruise postponed

By this time I should have been way out to sea, soon nearing station ALOHA (abbreviation for A Long-term Oligotrophic Habitat Assessment), which basically is a position some 10 hours by ship north of Oahu and Honolulu. To clarify; it's just a pre-decided patch of ocean marked with a single buoy.
Anyway, that didn't happen. The reason being some kind of engine failure of the research vessel, the R/V Kilo Moana. Thankfully it was quickly repaired and so we are finally scheduled to depart Honolulu tomorrow morning (local time), 2 days late.

During the wait for the ship to be repaired we had the days filled with Illumina sequencing and genomics theory as well as mathematical exercises where we calculated estimates of microbes and genetic material in the surface waters of station ALOHA. Not easy, but very interesting. There's a lot of stuff out there, both bound in cells and dissolved in the sea water.
Before going to the ship, we had a tour in the labs that we will use after the cruise. I've never seen such spacious and well organized labs, and on top of that they were filled with fancy instruments. Half of them I couldn't even tell what they were for. They even had an automatic pipetting instrument which did all pipetting work on 96-well plates by itself. Lastly, we were introduced to Illumina's prototype Next Seq.

Tonight is my first night on board, and it also marks the first day of my second research cruise. It will be a relatively short cruise (7 days is the current preliminary number due to the delay) where we will head out to station ALOHA (which actually is the same sampling location as for the Hawaii Ocean Time-series (HOT) which is an oceanographic monitoring program running since 1988), and sample as much as we can possibly manage. We have been divided into 5 groups (3-4 students in each group) which will rotate on a schedule of 5 different methodologies or sampling subjects. So my order of sampling is already decided and will be as follows: biomass, CTD, diversity, flow cytometry and finally productivity.
There will be loads of new methods to learn and get hands on experience of, which is great! I'm really looking forward to broadening my skills as a researcher. We will do many of the analysis preparations on board so once we get back to the lab we will start running the genome sequencing and metagenomics analysis which I'm looking forward to the most. It's a tough schedule but if the faculty are convinced we will manage then I am too I guess.

So far I've just had a short time to explore the ship, but what I've seen makes it fairly different from the last cruise ship I was on, the R/V L'Atalante.

For starters, this ship is smaller. It is 56 m long (30 m shorter) and 26 m wide (actually 11 m wider), and the reason for the odd proportions is that it is basically a catamaran.
In addition to the pure physical, arrangements on board are a lot different. No housekeeping, no waiter and no alcohol, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I will probably write more on this topic during the cruise. Buffé is awesome and there is always snacks of every single kind (fruit, chocolate, candy, grain bars, muffins, cookies, ice cream, bread, cereals, soft drinks etc,) available. How great is that!? I can definitely do without beer when there's ice cream readily available 24/7!