Crozet Cruising 27/12/2005

A few days have passed since the last blog. Eventful days they have been, indeed perhaps too eventful! Christmas Eve was certainly the worst day we have had so far and as events unfurled, matters did not improve. In the end, we abandoned station M5 as the weather set in. It had been our intention to steam to our next station some 16 hours away on Christmas Day, but we had to heave to and sit out a pretty nasty storm instead. To date, we have lost the best part of 6 days to bad weather! Not good. What made matters much worse though was the accidental loss of ROBIO – this was a big blow to all of us, especially those from Aberdeen as the ROBIO is a reliable little lander and had already provided some great images, as you saw in earlier blogs. Earlier we had lost (or rather failed to recover) Bathysnap, a time-lapse photographic system, which did not release from the sea floor after one year of collecting data. These are serious blows, but not terminal. Unfortunately, deep-sea research is difficult – it is not easy to deploy and recover anything at the sea floor two or more miles beneath the ship’s hull! To add to our woes, the e-mail link to the outside world also failed and so we were unable to contact our families and friends except on a rather flaky telephone line!

Farewell to ROBIO

Nevertheless, we made the most of Christmas Day. The catering staff did us proud with a full Christmas Dinner. The Captain gave a speech about Christmases past, we toasted absent friends and after dinner had a hat competition.

Having a Wonderful Christmas Time!

From all of us here on Discover 300, we wish you Festive Seasons Greetings!