I will be honest, after 5 months of being on furlough, I am finding work hard. Mostly the big drive twice a day from Glencoe to Oban, I feel too tired to exercise and I've been waking up early to send emails before going into the lab because I working from home when not on a boat or in the lab. Very weird times, but hopefully I will settle back into it in the next few weeks.
Seol mara the wee SAMS vessel took 2 months to fix, finally, we headed out to do some science. John, Norman and myself who make up the vessels team headed to our local site near SAMS and deployed a mooring! I was crewing and at the same time learning from John about how to prepare and deploy a moulding safely.
What is science without correct labelling of samples and calibration of instruments?!
My first proper week in the building of SAMS and I have been packing for my next cruise which I leave for in 4 weeks. 2 years ago we dropped off some deep-sea moorings with various sensors attached, next month we will be collecting these and I will be there to take water samples. Using the water samples I will collect bottles for nutrient, dissolved organic carbon and oxygen analysis. Onboard the NERC ship Discovery, known as the Disco I will be titrating seawater samples from the various depth and analysing the oxygen content to then transfer these numbers to a calibration curve to compare against the oxygen measurements on the sensors!
The kit leaves next week, but we don't leave until the end of September! The main difference for this cruise is that we are going to have to get COVID tested two times, part-time isolate and then social distance onboard for the first week. It's going to be weird.