23/01/2018 The Western Getz Mooring Marathon

In some ways it was lucky that Johan only realized quite how full the schedule was going to be at the western side of the Getz ice shelf two days before the cruise. Otherwise he might not have agreed to come on the cruise. The change of schedule had moved this work to the start of the second half of the cruise and there were only two stations before we started our first mooring recovery at 22.00 on 18 January.

After a few pings from the deck unit the release on the first mooring woke up and we got the okay from the bridge to release the mooring. Shortly afterwards we spotted the orange buoys at the surface and the ship inched up to them to catch the top float with grappling hooks and to start pulling the rope, floats and instruments onto the ship over the stern. The whole recovery took about an hour and by about 07.00 in the morning we had recovered two more moorings, the last rather close to the ice shelf edge. Mooring two didn’t tell us that it had released and just popped up to the surface. The top instrument on the third had been pushed to the next one below by an iceberg, but both were fine.

To get the new moorings into water we had to download the data from some of the instruments, change their batteries and give them a service as quickly as possible to not keep the ship waiting too long. Luckily we had help from the glider team and just after lunchtime we were ready to deploy the first of our new moorings. These first two deployments took us to dinner. The transit to the other side of the ice shelf gave us the opportunity to catch a few hours sleep before the last recovery and deployment. Those came and went without any problems as well and both us, and the deck crew were getting so efficient at the whole process that the time we were given on the schedule for each recovery and deployment was reduced from four to two hours. By the time it got to breakfast on 20 January we were finished, 34 hours after starting with all four moorings that we deployed in the area two years ago successfully recovered and three new ones in the water to take over their work.