Day 19 - 25th August

We arrived at the Cardigan Strait mooring line at around 10-11 am. We are slightly pressured for time due the ice delaying us earlier in the trip, so we set about to work as fast as we could. The critical task for today was to recover the three ADCP moorings left here in 2007 and possibly see if we could locate and release a further mooring that has been lost for four years. The three moorings from 2007 were located very rapidly and each one, carrying on the trend of the cruise, popped up with no problems at all. Due to strong currents in the strait, the floats used on the moorings were much larger than those used in Nares Strait as it helps to keep the instruments vertical. Because of this they were particularly impressive when they popped up as the extra buoyancy made the whole mooring leap onto the surface with quite a splash!

The plan is to turn all the moorings round overnight so they can be redeployed tomorrow. Not an easy feat! The result was that the foredeck was a hive of activity with numerous computers downloading and analysing the last two years of data whilst Joe, Ron and Dave got to work methodically removing all refurbishing all the battery cases, acoustic releases and constructing new anchors from old railway wheels and chains.

Much to our surprise as well, it appeared that the lost mooring was actually talking to us. This bode well and we decided to leave releasing it till tomorrow as we instead headed slightly south down the strait to complete another combined CTD/water sample section. Having planned for this to happen in the evening, many people for caught out with no diner when we arrived on station at 17:00. Seeing as we are use to eating at Larsen times we were all rather hungry when the section was finally completed at 19:38.

In the evening I played my first game of the darts competition with my team mate Richard who is one of the ice guys. We had been given a bye into the second round due to un-even teams and we were hoping to progress even further. However neither of us were shooting particularly well and we were beaten in the end 2-nil by Darlene (a deck hand) and Mike (chief engineer). It was a good laugh though and at times quite a close match. After the Ironman competition yesterday, we were all pretty jaded so most of us took an early night ready for another day in the Arctic.