Science aboard the Ocean Tramp

We’ve had an excellent day on board Ocean Tramp today, with some nice scientific results starting to come through, not to mention excellent views and whales! It’s taken a little while to get everything up and working, and to try out some different options, but we’re now getting some results. We ran two samples with the net today, around midday then late afternoon. The first was a trail for a half hour and we collected quite a range of small wriggly creatures and one very small piece of plastic! Which is both exciting and disappointing to find that plastics have found their way into this otherwise beautiful and pristine environment. By coincidence this transect ended with some whales, a mother and calf, which was exciting for all on board.

We ran the second transect for an hour, with some weights to try getting some deeper samples, which was fairly successful, but still needs experimenting with! We picked up quite a bit of big stuff, mostly bits of kelp. Both the samples have been run through filters and will be analysed when we have some quiet weather. It’s exciting being able to do this experiment as well as the water sampling, because this is easy to do as we’re on the move. It’s also a great way of getting large samples over longer periods of time.

We’ll be steaming through the night to get to Port Williams and I’ll be on watch at the most delightful time of 4am to 6am, so we might run some evening transects too to see what we can see!

One of the more mechanically minded crew have also fixed some of our fishing gear so fingers crossed we should be able to start fishing soon.

All up, a great day for science and a great day for sailing.


-          Amelia (Aussie Scientist)

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