Belated final cruise post

Gareth here. Our last cruise wrapped up very nicely but things have been so busy since I haven't had time to post to the blog. Overall things went great on this trip. We found large amounts of krill, right where we hypothesized they would be. We spent a few days mapping out their distribution along the flank of Georges Bank, and then another few days tracking one portion of the aggregation we found, to see how the aggregation changed between day and night. As is usually the case, the krill moved up towards the surface during the night and back down near the bottom during the day - a migration of about 150m! We're all interested to put together all the different data we collected with our different instruments to see how these kinds of movements interact with things like currents.

The science party, happy to be back in port after a successful cruise. Back row (L to R): Tim White, Gareth Lawson, Tobias Work, Reny Tyson, Cindy Sellers, Julie van der Hoop, Kaylyn Becker, Peter Wiebe, Qianqian Liu. Kneeling (L to R): Nick Woods, Wu-Jung Lee (Photo: Wu-Jung Lee)

The weather became nasty towards the end of the cruise and we had to return to port a day early, but we achieved all of our objectives and more so we weren't too sad. Pretty soon we'll be back out there for the second cruise of this project -- that will be the most interesting part, to see how things have changed between the cruises!

In the meantime, here is a poem from Cindy Sellers, who is part of our acoustics team, inspired by being home:

Home a day early
-----------------

Storm's a brewing, better run.
Science is over now, no more krill fun.

Briskly we pack up, stop for a beer,
Scatter like autumn leaves as the storm draws near

All the land is rocking but it is in my head
Back to my cozy home back to my bed

Morning comes sunny, no drenching occurs,
But storms winds are gusting as the last week blurs

Winds toss trees above me instead of seas below
While high above fallen leaves and puffy clouds flow

Rain will come soon and wash away the pain
But in three weeks we'll be out there again