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Our first and second beam trawls last night. Plenty of happy biologists and technical crew around today, having successfully deployed the gear and retrieved it with material to sort, and photographs and video of the sea floor. A third beam trawl was a camera only affair (no net), and in a “The Gods must be Crazy” moment, saw an image returned to the surface of a muddy sea floor surface with a beer bottle just on the edge of the lit area, in about 1300 m of water.
It’s been a great start to the project (with the usual handful of first-time glitches), which aims to assess the vulnerability of the sea floor habitats in Antarctic waters to the impact of longline fishing and trawling. We steamed west slowly last night and this morning, turning south at the 100 E meridian. We have just turned east, and are tracking towards a seamount marked on our charts as rising to 84m below sea level. The charts have so far proved to be less than reliable, so it’ll be interesting to see if it’s there or not! More trawls planned for this afternoon/evening.
Regards, Doug, Aaron & Margaret
Map
A map showing Australia and Antarctica. The map shows the journey of one voyage that has occured in the season, with each route highlighted in a distinct colour.