5 February
Last night, I was just trying to get some sleep, sliding around in my pit as the ship rocked back and forth. All I could think about was that morning coffee. We even brought a coffee machine with us—science doesn’t happen without coffee!
Our wake-up call was at 0650—time for the ship to stir the crew into action. Over the main broadcast, the person on watch blows a tune through the boatswain’s pipe, followed by a quick burst of a song from their playlist. Then, the familiar chant rings out: "Call the hands, call the hands, call the hands, wakey, wakey, wakey." That’s your signal to get unless you’re already up from doing EMAs (early morning activities) at 0600, which, for the record, I didn’t do.
We’ve had some challenges with the Rutter Ice Nav system the past couple of days but after some solid round the clock troubleshooting and satellite phone calls with the team at DST we got it working. Touch wood, cross your heart and fingers, sacrifice a goat on the quarter deck that it stays up. 😊
While all of this of going on, we still had other science tasks to complete. To date we have deployed 11 SOFAR wave buoys, out of the 19 we started with. The NZDF has been deploying these wave buoys since 2016 on behalf of the Office of Naval Research. They are manually deployed from the quarter deck – which basically means they are thrown off the back of the ship. We have been inviting the crew to get involved with the buoy deployments, and got a fair bit of interest in throwing something off the ship.
So, we finally got the green light to try trailing a laundry bag behind the ship for an hour! Honestly, when I first got picked for this trip, I figured I was just here to help with whatever science stuff needed doing. But it turns out, my real role might be questioning Peter’s endless stream of wild ideas. He also has us freeze seawater to make ice... more on that later. Right now, it’s time to try out the SAC method (the laundry bag test).
Every morning, we start at 7:30 am with eDNA sampling - quantifying marine biodiversity through fragments of their DNA in seawater, with identification to a sub-species level. First, we grab our sponges, filter kits, two jerry cans, and a small bucket, and then head down the endless flights of stairs to the Machinery Space, where the sewage treatment plant (STP) is. We’ve got this one sea water sample point we’re using, so we fill up our jerry cans there. After that, it’s back up to the quarter deck. One set of sponges goes into the chilly bin to sit for an hour, and the other set goes into a bra bag inside a laundry bag, which gets attached to a rope with a dive weight and thrown overboard. The whole setup gets dragged through the ocean, and after an hour, we haul it back in and store the sponges.
The whole point of this is to compare the eDNA samples from the chilly bin (water that’s filtered through the ship’s sea strainer) with the ones we get using the SAC method. This might help scientists eliminate other DNA samples that have been in the sea strainer from other waters in which HMNZS Aotearoa has sailed.