February 2012 Expedition - Day 7 - Stormy weather

The good weather of the past week looks like it might be over for a day or two at least, the wind is certainly up and the seas are significantly higher.  This makes our work much harder, from loading equipment from the ship onto the inflatables, getting over the reef, and being bounced up and down when working in shallow sites.

As with all expeditions like this, we are trying to pack the proverbial quart into a pint pot, and any delays can play havoc with the schedule.  We have deliberately kept a flexible schedule as it is sometimes difficult to predict how much you will be able to achieve on a dive.  If there is a strong current for example, or if some piece of equipment fails or, as might happen here, the weather changes, then parts of the work need to be trimmed to suit.  We are packing things in as efficiently as we can just in case of any delay. 

Today more temperature loggers were deployed at 25 metre and 5 metre depths on the stunningly diverse and rich seaward slopes of Salomons.  Numerous BRUVS (the camera monitoring systems described previously, of which much more in a later blog) were set on the seaward side of reefs, more cryptic fauna sites were sampled and the last of the various fish transects for this atoll were completed.

Much of this work is ongoing, the temperature loggers have been in situ (with replacements with new batteries every so often) for six years.  The fish counts, started in 2006, were repeated in 2010 and now again in 2012.  The coral cover measurements have been repeated at various intervals since 1978, one of the longest continuous coral cover monitoring anywhere in the world. 

Of course there are new projects on every expedition, on this one they are the BRUV and cryptic work and the fish response times (to show how tame or afraid they are compared to other locations in the world).   The evenings are filled with sample sorting for those who collect samples, with data entry and photo transfers.