A really good day today... we have got shore leave!!! Took loads of pictures, but that will come up later.. am still catching up with the diary... one more pic on flickr..

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8 October (Location: Banc de Kelso)

9.30 am So far so good.. I seem to have slept off the sickness of yesterday.

The catch of the day so far is a Hypothalassia armata. Big one!

Things I would kill for now… hong yu. Salonpas. Marks and Sparks Chocolate chip cookies…


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9th October (Banc de Nova)

I'm ok today.. just psyching myself up. This is not as bad as some situations.. say Andy McNab captured behind enemy lines in Iraq (Those of you who have read Bravo Two Zero will know the story..). After all, I don't get beaten up, I get fed good food everyday, and at least I know when this will end. hahaha.. I’m kidding. It is not sooo bad. After all, its an experience of a lifetime. Especially for a junior scientist like me, it is a rare learning experience, no doubts about it.

I’m having fun of course, despite the whinging. Not much to write about if not for the sickness. I’m having about as much fun as you can get on a small boat sailing the choppy high seas. It's a geeky sort of fun I suppose. Gets a bit monotonous, since we do about eight to ten trawls a day, so there is quite a bit of waiting followed by the load coming in. The waiting gives me headaches - it is by being busy that you’ve got no time to reflect on the misery of being seasick.

Once the bag comes in, there is a flurry of activity in which the sediments get fractionally sieved into smaller and smaller sizes, and then organisms of interest are picked and sorted into their different groups, corals, echinoderms, molluscs, crustaceans, polychaetes. Sometimes interesting stuff turns up, like manganese oxide nodules (characteristic of the deep seas), shark’s teeth, and even better, Megalodon teeth. Ooh, they will make such nice gifts. But its not quite so much fun sorting on deck under the sun with the waves crashing around you, especially the while sorting the finer fragments.

Now I appreciate specimens sitting in museums a lot more, especially those obtained from expeditions such as these. Poking through the bycatch pile in Phuket or beach combing is nothing compared with this! At least in Phuket, I get to stand on land, and get to go out at night in Patong after washing the fish juice off my wellies.

Man has been going for such sea faring expeditions way before anyone set foot on the moon, but look at how it is now. Nowadays probes, manned space missions are fired off with greater and better sophistication. We know now what's beyond Pluto, flight paths are planned with greater precision. Look at the exploration of the seas. It is ‘pathetic’ in comparison. Not very sophisticated, dredging and trawling. What we are doing now is not much different from HMS Challenger. Dropping a dredge or trawl into the sea, and scraping the top bit (1000 -5000 square metres at a time). Hoping that something interesting will turn up. Ok.. so these days we have echo-sounders, better mapping technologies and hydraulic winches which weren't invented back then, but that's about that.

And to think I was complaining about how come there were only ONE specimen of Calappa acutispina from Madagascar. I take it all back now!!!

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11 Oct (Location: Bellona Plateau)

Late start to the day. When I emerged from my cabin onto the deck, I was surprised to see both dredge and trawl still on the deck. It was already past 7am. Usually the first dredge would have come in by now. Why?

"Oh.. ze bottom zis a bit complicated" Pierre told me, accompanied by undulating motions of the hand and a shrug. Ah, I understand now…the seabed was uneven, which made it tricky to dredge. The captain had to map the bottom first, to figure out where was a good place to trawl.

The first dredge finally went down at 8.30 a.m. We were going deep, about 700-800 metres. The site of choice was a channel between Bellona Plateau and Coriolis Bank. In fact, Coriolis Bank was discovered and named by Bertrand and Philip from one of the earlier Musorstom cruises! Fancy that!

The first few trawls didn't bring in anything spectacular. Just lots and lots of rocks. I can almost imagine what an inhospitable place that is. Fast flowing currents, barren sandy bottom. Not a good place to live, if you were sponge or crinoid. Can’t get a toehold anywhere.

After lunch, things started to heat up, in all senses of the word. The sun was blazing hot. And then we had a couple of killer loads from the dredge.. lots and lots of sediments, especially tiny little flakes of Halimeda. And that completely sapped my energy for the rest of the day.

At about 6p.m, I thought I caught a whiff of Bryani in the evening breeze. My goodness.. I am hallucinating - Indian food! And I miss my chili padis. The food on board is good. Jacques and Marcel even served spring rolls for dinner last night. And the other day we had rum and raisin ice cream for dessert. But nothing is spicy. The bottle of chili sauce I had brought is almost gone. Everyone liked it. And considering the relative ease I brought it into New Caledonia. I should have taken an armload of sambal belachan and chili flakes.

Dessert was what Herve, the captain, dubbed 'Christian Choker Number Three'. It was a really dense banana tart. Really nice, and all the better if there were some chocolate sauce on it (but all I got was some jam to go with it.  ). But he was right. It was quite a bit of a choker, no matter your personal belief. I shall wait with trepidation what Christian Choker Number Two and One are.

To be continued…