A wonderful, wonderful day!

Dear earthlings, we are having a wonderful day. As if the good weather was not enough we have had for lunch a delicious rice with veggies and pork tenderloins in pepper sauce that many restaurants would wish to have in their menus.

We have been all day in shallow waters, between 80 and 400 m. The Portuguese ships have been in the horizon for hours but we have seen the Santa Cristina close enough to see her bring her catch onboard. The pictures are not very good, lightning was tricky and my photography has gone rusty.

Santa Cristina hauling her catch. The shadow in the water a few meters from the stern is the codend. Redfish always make the codend to float. You can also see how the trawl is half way up the stern.

Santa Cristina. If you enlarge the picture (I am not sure you can), you will see (or guess) in the stern three deckhands and the codend.

We have seen also many cetaceans. For about 15 minutes a group of them resembled a fountain in the middle of the ocean, we have counted 8 whales blowing rather close to each other. I don’t know if any of my colleagues would venture an identification. I don’t. We have also seen a whale very close to our prow (a humback) and another bunch not so close. So much going on that sometimes I just don’t know where to look at. Until the eleven screens around me remind me it is them I have to focus on.

I hope you can make out two blows here...

As I said, shallow waters: much larger catch than yesterday but not as diverse in species composition. Here there is a dominant species accompanied by several others in lesser amounts.

So far we have got mostly redfish, but also cod, white hake, silver hake, skates and American plaice. 

R. V. Vizconde de Eza. Redfish catch. 

The redfish goes into boxes to be weighted.

Redfish

Iñaki putting the cod in boxes. 

Sampling team (background) and cod (foreground)

All these species -and some more- have been thoroughly sampled:

Rai sexing small American plaice

Rai still sexing American plaice

Nair labelling a gonad sample

 And we have crossed paths with our friend White Diamond, a 20 m ship from St. John’s that targets snow crabs. Two years ago we had a lengthy conversation until we figured out where could each ship work without being on each other’s way. It took a while… 

The White Diamond on a silver ocean. Now, that was tacky...

Wow, it's so late and I have to get up so early! And do the Spanish version... see you tomorrow!