Well it’s been a great 24hrs – lots and lots of ROV operations. We’ve had one of  the most successful dives this cruise and to say we’ve seen some amazing sights is probably a fairly big underestimate!

During the morning we recovered our two elevators and the experiments were unloaded.

We deployed ISIS at midday and proceeded down to the seabed 3202m below us. The journey down took a little over 2 hours and was wholly uninteresting. However, when we reached the seabed we were greeted with a truly amazing sight. Lots of little sea slugs littered the seabed – massive collections of thousands and thousands of little critters as far as our lights would let us see.

We nearly had to brake out the tranquiliser gun for Prof Tyler who instantly got as excited as a kid in a sweet shop and was bounding round the ROV shack taking lots of pictures and exclaiming “Oh, look at that!” – lots more “oohhing” and “ahhing”.

The terrain was a bit more interesting than the flat areas we had dived previously and we came across huge towering cliffs many hundreds of feet high and covered in all manner of critters. On the cliffs we always need to be aware of overhangs, loose rocks and generally bumping the vehicle against the solid rock and damaging it – it takes a lot of concentration!

This dive game me a chance to pilot for a good few hours solid and we spent a lot of time sampling on the steep cliff faces. The sampling was quite intensive and Ben was on-hand with ISIS manipulator and suction sampler to grab the beasties that the scientists pointed out.

For once the geologists were happy as well. Unlike the previous abyssal like terrain they were confronted by huge slaps of rock and some amazing rock formations they were equally as excited as the biologists and a bit of friendly banter broke out between the biologists and geologists.

At 11:37 with the terrain becoming increasingly flat and somewhat uninteresting, Doug gave the order to bring ISIS home. I got the fun job of picking up our expendable weights and dropping them into the abyss to speed up our ascent.

At midnight a big crowd gathered to sing Prof Tyler “Happy Birthday” and present him with some presents. However, I think he was more excited by the huge hoard of samples that ISIS brought with her to the surface – a great birthday present for him!

With our watch over we went to the deserted bar and had a cuppa before going out and watching the other watch recover ISIS. The weather conditions were right on the edge of ISIS’s recovery window but the night watch took it in their stride and brought ISIS home safely – to be swamped by scientists eager for their samples!