St Helena Bay

Yesterday was long and exhausting. We were trawling in the deep and got big catches of lots of little fish that had to be sorted out and measured. By the end of the day I was finished. Dinner was really great as it was steak and I could have eaten a whole cow but did hold myself back. We had all hatched a plan to get alcohol from the ship's shop to have sundowners to relax after the hard work but were stood up by the Chief Steward so that came to nothing. I was so tired last night that I was beyond tired and hardly slept at all so getting up this morning was hard. But it is great to arrive on deck in the morning and be greeted with smiles from the crew.

This is the corner I share with Oddgeir to capture data after each trawl.

This morning it was overcast and cold - welcome to the West Coast. The ship had moved inshore to avoid some bad weather and we have been in sight of land in St Helena Bay all day. It has also meant that we have had small catches made up mostly of cockroaches (mantis shrimps) and not very many fish. It has been perfect sampling for a Sunday and we even got chocolate cake for afternoon tea! Our last trawl was a waste of time and the biggest component was rocks. When the net came up and we saw what was in the net, no one could keep the grins off their faces. Sharon, our co-chief scientist, kept on telling us we should at least pretend not to be happy but it was impossible. Now we are steaming on to the next station and we have a longish break since there was no sorting to do.

St Helena Bay.

We still have another trawl to do and then it will definitely be sundowners - we tracked down the Chief Steward right after breakfast this morning and got supplies for tonight!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A little fun in Mombasa

Image
It was so good to be back in Mombasa. It was 9 month since my last visit. This time I stayed at the Bahari Beach Hotel. Amazingly I had not stayed at this hotel before. Initially I had thought that I had been there but the beach hotels in Nyali are starting to all look the same to me. The Bahari Beach Hotel is a lovely place and I enjoyed it even though I was there for a series of back-to-back meetings. My bedroom was super comfortable with a lovely hard mattress. The only issue I had was that the in-room safe initially worked intermittently but eventually was fixed and for my inconvenience was given dinner and a glass of wine at the duty manager's expense. The gardens were really beautiful and a tranquil sight to wake up to every morning. And I loved watching the cats cavorting around the grounds while having breakfast. Unfortunately the tides were against me so only managed one walk on the beach but I did get to swim and I had fun one evening watching some Maasai dancers.
Read more

Roasting in Comoros

Image
After a dreadful series of flights on Kenya Airways to Mombasa last week, I started on this trip with some trepidation. My concerns were for naught really though. The inbound flight from Nairobi to Johannesburg arrived on time which gave me a lot of confidence that my flight would leave on time. In the end we left a half hour late but this was due to a passenger not having the correct travel documents and his luggage had to be unloaded. The wait in Nairobi was quite endless but I spent my time getting some exercise by walking up and down the departure gate corridors. There are only two so it was a bit monotonous but better than just sitting around. The flight to the Comoros departed quite late as the inbound flight was late. This meant that instead of arriving in Comoros at 23:35 we arrived at about 00:30. The Dreamliner arriving at OR Tambo International Airport There were ten of us that were arriving in Comoros for the same meeting and all of us needed to apply for a visa
Read more

Maputo

Image
My one night at home was a welcome change from sterile hotel rooms but there was so much to do and before long my suitcase was packed again. I thought that I would be nervous flying this morning since I was flying with SA Airlink who have had a bit of a bad time recently with accidents and incidents but I was completely okay. Maybe 2010 is my year for having discarded my fear of flying completely but the real proof will be next month when I fly from Mauritius to Seychelles and back on Air Seychelles since it is thanks to Air Seychelles that I developed this ridiculous fear in the first place. What contributed to my enjoyment of the flight was that it was on another cute little turbo propelled aircraft, this time a Jetstream 41. It only takes 29 people and there were only 11 on-board making it really comfy. Take-off was to the north-east so we had a lovely view of Durban and I couldn't help thinking as we flew over uShaka Marine World that that was the closest I have been to my off
Read more