Hmmm, it’s tough where to begin! It’s been another crazy weekend – probably the busiest few three days of the cruise! Friday saw lots of coring, to everyone’s frustration the weather was just  bit rough for deploying ISIS so we had to continue to coring.

A number of piston cores, mega cores and a CTD were deployed during Friday.

There was a fire drill on Saturday for the ship’s crew which saw them practicing searching for a casualty in a smoke filled room.

Saturday saw a change in the weather and our first window of opportunity for deploying the ROV.

Doug jumped at the opportunity and just after we came on at midday Saturday afternoon the ROV was being hoisted over the side and made ready to dive. Despite an early hiccup with a fuse blowing in the control van, the dive went spectacularly well and for twelve hours we explored the seabed and viewed some remarkable cliffs spanning many hundreds of feet high.

Finally the canyon’s started to reveal their secrets. We came upon a mass of xenophyophores which got Andy and the rest of the team very excited – these critters aren’t very well understood so we took a few samples for analysis. We also started to find lots and lots of cold water coral representing many hundreds of years of growth.

Sampling throughout the dive was intense as the scientists chose specimens that were needed for DNA cataloguing. I spent a fair few hours piloting on sheer cliffs which was a bit of a challenge because of the currents, terrain and not wanting to damage any of the fauna but really enjoyable. The selection of specimens we retrieved was good and these will help us understand the dynamics of the canyon system.

If our dive on Saturday had been amazing, we were installing for a truly spectacular dive during our Sunday watch. Launching at dinner we quickly made the descent to the seabed some 1500m below us. As we approached the seabed the visibility became poor and the terrain was incredibly rough – lots of broken boulders and strong currents. Controlling ISIS was quite intense. Then the currents gradually died down and we came upon a sheer mass of stone covered in the biggest collection of coral I had  (and many others in the control van) ever seen. We had stumbled on something amazingly special! For the next 5 hours we moved up and down the wall studying the huge clumps of coral that covered every inch of the canyon wall and photographing every critter we came across. This coral was home to a massive variety of beasties who lived inside the mass of intertwined coral. However, we had little time to admire the scenery! The rock face may have been sheer – but there were lots of overhangs we had to skirt and we encountered our first fishing net and long lines caught in crevasse on the cliff face. The team was on form calling out any overhangs or obstacles that presented a danger to the ROV. The dive was an immense success. We traversed across and up and down the cliff taking nearly 1000 images!