11 July - Friday

The morning was taken up with collecting mud, water and plankton samples, so we caught up with paperwork. In the afternoon, we steamed along a grid, searching for the pink dye again, after Dave the electronics wizard had finished repairs to the device that detects the dye (called a Scanfish). We collected seabird data and continued to see occasional places where gannets and storm-petrels were feeding. Not much of excitement to report, I'm afraid.

So I thought I would take you on a short tour of the equipment we use, and how it has changed over the 25 or so years I have been in this business.

Firstly, the data sheets. These have changed a little since I first started, to reflect the slightly different priorities in what we record at sea. The method we has changed little over the years, and is still basically a line transect method with "snapshot" counts for flying birds - these are just point counts at regular intervals along the transect line, and are designed to freeze the flight of the birds so that we can work out their density at sea. We still use the Mark I eyeball to detect the birds, so in many ways, the clipboard represents the thing that has probably changed the least in my history of recording birds at sea.



We use time to link our bird sightings to the position of the ship when we see them. So I have shown a photograph of a clock. We used clocks in the old days just like this, but they weren't these super-duper radio-controlled clocks that are now available. At regular intervals during the day, the clock receives a signal from somewhere in the Midlands of England to update the time. This means you don't have to check your clock is reading exactly the same time used by the one to record the ship's position data.

A modern radio-controlled clock


In the olden days, we used to have to remember to keep looking at the clock, and do the snapshots at exact time intervals throughout the day. Now we have watches with timers that give an alarm at exact time intervals for us. This means we are prompted to do the snapshots and never have to deal with the contingency for when we forget to do our snapshot counts. The alarm drives you nuts though.

A watch with coutdown timer

This is one of the biggest changes since the 1980's, the portable GPS. We used to have to use something called Decca navigation. This was a network of radio beacons dotted around the coast that mariners could use to work out their position to the nearest mile. Decca licensed the only machines that could detect these signals, and the main one available was called a Decca Yachtmaster 21, a huge brute of a box that took up half the space on the average ship's bridge. You had to peer down on a screen, wait for three flashes, then quickly scribble down the numbers displayed. You then took these numbers over to a special Admiralty chart with all the Decca lanes marked on it and plotted out your position at the intersection of the readings. If you were well practiced, you could do all this and read off your position in latitude and longitude in about 60 seconds. Now we have little GPS devices that you can slip into your pocket. These log your position, accurate to 10 metres, every 10 seconds if you wish, and show your course, speed, time and all kinds of other information. At the end of the day you simply download all this information straight into your computerised database.

Talking of computers, when I started out in this business, we used to have to code all our seabird sightings using a pen onto paper sheets printed with 80 columns across. It was a horrendously labour-intensive job, and incredibly error-prone too. When laptop computers came along, and we wrote a small data entry application to computer-code all our sightings, they improved things so much that, although expensive, they paid for themselves in the first 3 months we had them.

Kids today, they don't know they're born!