29 July 2012 - Fishing and Sunshine

So while the weather so far on this trip has been great, we've had less luck with the fish and squid showing up where we'd like them. Part of this project involves us capturing hake and squid and since we can't trawl from this ship, the Oregon State group has rods and reels to fish for them. So far we haven't had any luck with this since the fish have been very deep (~ 300 m or so).  But we did have some luck yesterday during our survey with one of our scientists doing a bit of recreational trolling and he caught a 25 lb albacore tuna (which is on the menu for tonight).

Aaron, a scientist from OSU, caught this albacore yesterday. It's on the menu for dinner tonight.

This cruise is a bit of a reunion for me with our ship, the RV Oceanus.  The Oceanus used to be operated and located at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution which is where I went to grad school. So I sailed on two cruises on the Oceanus in the late 90s.  The Oceanus is now operated by Oregon State (they even painted the stack Orange and Brown!) so it's been fun to be back on the same ship a decade later.

The RV Oceanus at the dock here in Newport. It's  ~ 175 feet in length, has a crew of  ~ 12 and 10 scientists are onboard this trip.

As part of going to sea, we go through a series of safety drills if we ever needed to abandon ship (for all the mom's reading this blog, this is a very very unlikely event).  One of the safety features are immersion suits (sometimes called Gumby suits) which are neoprene suits that provide floatation and warmth in case you had to get off the Oceanus. It takes a little practice to figure out how to put them on so as part of the ship orientation, everybody tries one on.

Emily,(no really, that's Emily. I'm sure of it.) successfully in her Gumby suit.

That's it for now,

Joe