Changing of the guard... in a way

Today is mid-survey day and as usual the teams have swapped shifts, so from now on it is Jose Luis’ team who has to get up early. The deckhands change their shifts tomorrow because they take into account the dates, not the hauls.

Last early morning for Teo & Co. From left: Teo, Jose Luis, Luis and Luis

Yesterday we finished the day just as we started, with a very small catch. The total was so scarce that I am not going to say it aloud. Today we will get better figures because we have been fishing between 100 and 500 m and we got redfish, but other than that there was very little. We just finished the area we call 3O and we have completed 15 strata. Now we have to adjust very well the hauls left in this are before we proceed north. 

Jose and Vanessa sexing redfish

Lucía and Vanessa sampling cod, Cristina and Javier in the background

We are testing these headphones and we like them very much

The lack of fish means less physical work and less tiredness at the end of the day. This year the biologist crew is spending less time watching movies and more time engaged in other tasks, such as gyotaku, which is a Japanese technique of fish printing. In a nutshell, it consists of impregnating a fish with ink and then covering it with rice paper, exerting the right pressure so that the paper absorbs the ink. Does it sound easy? Well it is not. To begin with, different species absorb the ink differently, so you can impregnate a fish very well and not get a drop of ink on the paper, or you can go carefully and blot the paper nevertheless. If you are going to try it at home, put on an apron, cover the table where you are going to do this very well and move away from the wall. So far only Teo’s shift has tried it –because they were off duty after dinner, so I will wait a few days to have some pieces by Jose Luis’ team before choosing a couple of them to show in the blog. 

This handsome monkfish came in one of the hauls with a mouthful of redfish. The box is 80 cm in length.

Oh my. It is so late that the last haul is already in, but I'll tell you about that tomorrow. Have you seen on the map that we have seen the sun again? Taking in the same day deep and shallow hauls is very fine, it gives us the chance to leave behind for a while the fog eternally stuck in the Grand Banks...

Rubén, Juan, David and Javier waiting for the next haul. They do not do this in the fog.