10 July - Thursday part 3

There have been problems with some of the equipment that measure turbulence. The profiler, that was being winched up and down every five minutes eventually got a snag on the cable. The scanfish, that was to be used to try and detect the pink dye released yesterday, got caught on a gillnet set on the sea bed. Both are out of action and being subjected to urgent running repairs. So, in the mean time, we are towing something called a t-chain. The good news is that this will detect water turbulence in the water beneath the ship as we steam along. The bad news is that we can only do this at about 3 knots speed (that's a little bit faster than 3 mph to you land-lubbers).

So we go out to do more seabird observations. It's like birding on valium; the birds take forever to appear, and when they do, they take forever to go. It's a bit like when you've been driving on the moterway for a long time, then turn off and drive in a 30 mph zone. Actually, I don't know what it's like to bird on valium, but I imagine it must be like this. So we take most of the day to do a circuit of all the buoys that are marking out all the sensors that have been chucked into the sea. We did the same circuit three times in the same time a few days ago.

We see gannets and storm-petrels and fulmars and not much else. But the big advantage of going this slowly became clear later. We spot some distant common dolphins a long way ahead of the ship. This gives me time to tell everyone on the ship to come out and take a look. This is great, because one or two of the scientists on board have never seen dolphins before. Dolphins are always a treat to see.