5 July Saturday

We decided the night before to wake at dawn to practice doing "point counts" at fixed stations. These are to be a new technique as far as seabird surveys at sea are concerned, and we needed to be sure that they would work.

The ship was like the Marie Celeste, just a sign saying that deploying of moorings (aka throwing expensive equipment over the side of the ship) was suspended because of 40 mph winds. This seemed a bit odd, so we looked outside. Sure enough, the sea was rather white with foam and spindrift. Time to go back to bed me thinks.

We spent the day computer coding our data and updating the data entry programs. I managed to lock myself out of my laptop computer after trying to get it to connect to the ship's network. I sent a rather plaintive email to our IT support to get the administrator password. I heard choirs of angels when I checked my email later - both Carl and Sue had responded with help on a Saturday. What stars!



The weather eased off a bit in the afternoon, at least enough for us to practice the point count survey methods. There were a lot of birds associated with the ship, and lots of stormies feeding. Our first glitch - they were all getting excited by the food waste being jettisoned from the galley. We'll have to try and do something about that, considering the point of these counts is to show how feeding behaviour changes at different states of the tide. Apart from that, the method seemed to be holding up.

The oceanographers managed to deploy another set of buoys with instruments attached, so we steamed slowly to the final station. We saw a couple more Cory's shearwaters - both seemed to be the Atlantic race - which raised the spirits. I went through a ridiculous comedy routine of trying to stick a plastic bag to the desk in our observation box with Duck tape. Every time I tore off a strip, the wind would blow the sticky parts together, rendering it useless for fixing the plastic bag to its intended location. Classic comedy it wasn't, but it amused the hell out of us.