The second leg of the voyage has started!
- Nansen in Dakar, conclusion of first leg
After arriving in Dakar for the conclusion of the first leg of the North West Africa survey, a new team of scientist was taken on board the R/ V Dr Fridtjof Nansen on 30 October to start the second leg of the journey.
Day 1 – On the first day we were off! We set sail from Dakar and start steaming out to the first transect along our journey. Seas are rough and everyone is feeling a bit under the weather.
After a tour of the ship and its safety features, Reidar, our Cruise Leader, suggests an early night so we can get a good start in the morning.
- The voyage starts again
Day 2 – Day two and the seas are not any calmer. Most of us are still getting used to our sea legs. We had passed into Mauritania in early morning and the acoustics were already pinging away, looking for fish. We split the group into two shifts to cover four sections of a 24-hour period.
Half of the scientists are on the midnight – 6am and noon – 6pm shift, and the other half is on the 6am – noon and 6pm – midnight shift. Reidar and Diana, the IMR technician, are both on call throughout the day.
Splitting the groups is necessary as there is often trawling done at night and there must always be someone on watch. The morning is pretty slow but in the afternoon we get our first trawl!
This is good news as the technicians hadn’t been seeing any acoustic evidence of fish until now. After a trawl of 30 minutes, the crew land the catch and the scientists get to work sorting the fish by species, taking length and weight measurements, and gathering data on the maturity and stomach contents of the fish.
We have a couple of small sharks as bycatch, and Diana takes information on the stomach and gonads. Three more trawls are done in the evening: all in all a good day!
- Land again!
- First leg participants
