Bright day, interrupted work, and eclipse of the sun
Yesterday was one of the brightest days that I have ever experienced at Jubany. There was virtually no wind and the sea surface was very smooth. A day to go to the outer parts of Potter Cove. We could arrange that and off we went for a RoxAnn survey.
RoxAnn is a seafloor classification system that measures the roughness and the hardness of the seafloor via hydroacoustics. Facundo, our boat driver, knows the area very well and we appreciate also very much his navigational skills. After measuring the shallower areas down to a water depth of 60 m we had to change the settings of the RoxAnn system for deeper waters. After that RoxAnn refused to work and we had to go back to the base to replace the system with the second one that we brought. After that one of the computers refused to work and had to be replaced. Back to the outer Potter Cove we started to measure again but after an hour the power generator went off and wouldn't start again. So we were forced to stop for this day and got back at around 18:00 although the conditions were still very good for work. After all we gathered a couple of hours of data and hope for more such days in the near future. Christian, one of the mechanics at Jubany did his second excellent job repairing the power generator. The day before yesterday he fixed the winch that turned out to be broken ever since it was used last time. Today we plan to go to the outer part of the cove to do measurements with the sidescan sonar. This morning we missed an 80% solar eclipse. The maximum eclipse was in the Weddell Sea, just a few 100 km from our place. However, since it was so early in the morning, the eclipse was at or shortly before sunrise and could not be observed from our location, bad luck.
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