8 July - Tuesday

Today was a long day that began at dawn for us and continued through the day. The ship is towing a moving vessel profiler (MVP to the TLA enthusiasts on board). We steam around a fixed oval track once every 2 hours 5 minutes for a 25 hour period (although we can't do seabird observations in the dark). This gives us a full tidal cycle - from high water, to low water, to high to low and back again. The profiler measures turbulence in the water and shows the way currents are forcing goodies (nutrients, plankton and fish) to near the surface, where there should be lots of seabirds taking advantage of them. That's the theory, although I'm not sure the seabirds are reading the whole script. But it's early days yet.

The weather in the afternoon has been quite reasonable, with moderate winds and sunshine on occasions. The fair weather has brought visitors to our observation box (here-after referred to as "bird box groupies" to see what we're up to. It's a quiet day for some of the other scientists, with no winching of instruments to be done. For us, it adds a bit of variety to a long day, and also gives us a chance to demonstrate what it is we're looking for. Some of them have been helpful: one person brought us a large bottle of water to keep us hydrated; another brought ice-creams in wafers all-round - wonderful. One scientist offered to let us photograph her beaver (see right) which was very kind, but not necessary.

Well, the weather didn't stay nice the whole time, and it started to rain around tea time. Mark and Adam saw a couple of ocean sunfish, and between us we saw 10 Cory's shearwaters plus a few great and arctic skuas. There seemed to be some consistent patterns to gannet and storm-petrel feeding. Hopefully, this will make a bit of sense when we can analyse the data. Something we saw that was very interesting was watching one of the Cory's shearwaters attempting to feed - it dipped low over the water and splashed its feet against the water, almost seeming to kick the tops of the waves. A young kiitiwake started following it, perhaps hoping to get and easy meal.