Cape Farewell - Eirik Ridge:
RRS Discovery Cruise 309
D309 Diary 14, 4 September 2006, by Sheldon Bacon
Apologies to readers of this diary for a few missed days.
We've reached the end of science for this cruise and we're now steaming in towards our end port, Reykjavik.
I find it a little difficult at the end to keep the diary going because we're all a bit played out.
This, therefore, is the last diary entry as we'll be docking early tomorrow morning (5 September).
What of the preceding few days?
We managed several more CTD stations, but most importantly we recovered our mooring G, the final (easternmost) one in our line, and redeployed the second NIOZ profiling mooring.
So the final work tally is: seven NOC moorings recovered, out of seven deployed last year, with all attached instruments having a complete data set bar one (96% data return), the five planned NOC mooring deployments completed, and one German and all three NIOZ moorings recovered, serviced and redeployed.
25 CTD profiles were completed, as well as three MVP tows.
All in all, an unusually successful cruise.
We broke off the science about midday on Saturday 2 September, and we've been steaming back to Iceland since then, finalising data calibrations, writing cruise report contributions, and preparing the cruise data to return home.
So it is rather pleasant to report that the final notable event of the cruise was the turning of Cabin 28 into an art gallery this evening for an impromptu exhibition by Pippa of her artwork created during the cruise: I'm sure it's the first time there has been a showing on Discovery of this sort (see picture).
A couple of bottles of chilled white wine (admittedly slightly ropy, but you can't have everything) and some trays of nibbles whipped up by the galley staff added further verisimilitude.
So thanks to all of you who have been following this diary, I hope you have enjoyed it.
And if you want to catch up with Pippa's work, she'll be having exhibitions (on land) in coming months and years - see Diary 13 for her websites for details.
The charts shows positions until midnight GMT:
overnight 31 August / 1 September
overnight 1/2 September
overnight 2/3 September
