Dispatch 23: The End of Science and About that Third ITP     Print

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Hugo Sindelar

September 29, 2018

Location: 70° 0’ N 140° 0’ W

Weather: -4°C (25°F), Mostly cloudy, seas variable due to ice, Northeast winds at 23 knots, seawater temperature -0.2°C (31.6°F)

Sea Ice: Ice coverage increasing to completely covered by the end of the day

In the previous dispatch, I gave you a small taste of the night shift onboard.  True to form, their efficiency kept me from filming the last CTD cast coming onboard the ship.  It was scheduled to occur at around noon or 1 p.m. today, but the night shift put the pedal to the metal and powered through the rest of the ML line early this morning.  After staying up until 5 a.m. with them, I got a bit of sleep and arrived back on deck around 10 a.m. to find the final CTD cast waiting in the rosette shack.  We will do one more XCTD as we head towards Kugluktuk with a scheduled arrival on Monday evening.  After the XCTD, science on the ship will officially be over.  Everyone on board is currently processing their final samples now before packing up all their equipment for its journey home.

And just when the WHOI team thought they were finished, our journey home took us close to the current location of the third ITP we were trying to recover earlier in the trip.  Jeff O’Brien programmed the ITP to update its location more frequently, ensuring we had a good location fix for it.  The only problem was, we were not slated to be near it until around midnight.  The deck crew of the CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent, however, were happy to work a bit of overtime.  Using the large spotlights of the ship, we were able to recover the third ITP even in the middle of the night in heavy ice.  With the last-minute ITP grab complete, we continued to pick our way through the ice in hopes of reaching the open waters of Amundsen Gulf.