We have managed to work out most of the equipment bugs that occur early during a cruise. Yesterday, for example, we began to notice that our workhorse instrument, the CTD, was introducing electronic noise into some of the data channels. Since the fish is too complex to repair out here we decided to swap it for our spare. So while the ship spent several hours steaming 40 miles south to the Cleft segment and many of the scientists could enjoy a short break in their constant duties, some of us spent the time tearing apart the CTD package and installing a new fish. As of July 24th we have collected over 40 hours of CTD data and more than 200 water samples.
Many different scientists subsample each water sample.
You can follow our daily progress on the accompanying chart. We will be sampling until August 3rd.