15 July - Wednesday

We have had another day of watching gannets. Don't get me wrong, I am very fond of gannets and love watching them feeding. To me, there is little more exhilirating than watching a gannet nut the water from a start of about 200 feet. I can't help but think it must hurt. However, there is a limit to how much time I can spend watching the same gannets. We have a slow start today after the turbulence profiler breaks. Eventually, we get started on the scanfish survey around the bank edge. We see a Manx shearwater on each of our three circuits around the buoys this evening.

Beth is tearing her hair out. After months of preparation and getting agreement from different fishing groups to prevent any of them getting in the way of this study, one of them has set his gill nets out across the very bit of the bank we are trying to study, and repeated attempts to get him to move are falling on deaf ears. Bloody-minded or what. We almost certainly snagged and broke the scanfish earlier in the cruise when he set the nets before we knew what he'd done.

Today's spotlight is on Inigo Martinez' (there should be a squiggle above the 'n' in Inigo) work on board. He is doing a PhD in the waters around the UK, based at the Aberdeen Marine Laboratory. On this cruise, he is doing a photo-study of fishes on the sea bed. He has a camera and flash guns attached to a frame and at the base, a baited platform with a graticule for measuring the fish lengths. These are timed to go off at one-minute intervals. All the kit has to withstand the water pressure at the sea bed, and of course mustn't leak.

Bringing the rig on board and retrieving the camera

He has had anxious times, because when the camera is deployed, he doesn't know if it has worked at all until he attempted to retrieve the apparatus about 24 hours later. The camera takes one photo every minute of a platform beneath the camera that is baited with mackerel. If it works well, all kinds of creatures come into the bait. He has seen some interesting things, including lots of Nephrops (Norway lobster, or scampi if you prefer), baby squid, haddock and whiting. Here is the star photo from the trip so far, a rather large conger eel, measured at 1.7 metres.

Monster conger eel