Talking about the weather

As you'd expect for a British ship many traditionally British things transfer from land to life aboard (like drinking lots of tea). And you couldn't get much more British than talking about the weather. The weather of course has a major influence when at sea and I'm not just on about how likely you are to need the sun tan lotion. The wind and swell conditions are the most important in terms of the ship's motion and thus the ability to do whichever work tasks we have planned.

Today the weather was discussed in more depth than usual with the upshot being that the planned recovery of our WB6 mooring (at 26.5°N, 70.5°W) had to be postponed due to high winds and an increasing swell. So the weather forecasts have been scrutinised (once they could actually be downloaded on our slow internet connection), and with things looking to calm down in a couple of days we sit and wait for now.

Not horrendous, but too bad for the mooring recovery we planned

We're not actually just sitting here doing nothing though - well not just yet anyway. Fortunately CTDs are able to be conducted in worse conditions than mooring recoveries so that's what we're doing today. Most of our CTDs planned for this trip are for moored instrument validation with each instrument being "dipped" before it is deployed on a mooring and again following recovery. And of course we continue with the essential work of processing the data we have collected so far and preparing the equipment for the western boundary moorings - which, aside from WB6, will all be serviced in the last week of the cruise.