The fisher king

Today Friday has been so intense that I don't know where to start... maybe with catches from yesterday? We caught no more no less than 84 fish species, what makes me wonder if only mermaids managed to escape from us. Total catch was about 10500. More than half of the catch was redfish, with 5700 kg, capelin 2800, cod a mere 400 and American plaice 350 kg. Think about this: we have four biologists in each watch, plus four seamen that fortunately help us to sort the fish. Thus yesterday there were 1312 kg of fish per person to sort... and weight!!! Each box takes 30-35 kg of fish, so each person had to weight 40 boxes. But because they are too big, two people are needed for the task: this means each person had to lift on average 80 boxes. Then the fish has to be measured, etc, etc, etc; the stomachs sampled, the CTDs done and the data saving done, each haul with 10-15 forms. Do I have any takers for next year??

I am also carrying out some data quality control, not only to find typos but to evaluate the sampling quality. It is amazing because there are hauls that simply have no errors. When a figure does not match exactly (100 g above or below, some fish length wrongly written or typed) we can find the error, thus no records had to be deleted so far. One of my worries were the length-weight relationships, but they look like text book examples. See the graph for American plaice (Muggur, if you are reading this, yes, it is done in excel because I am too tired to export the data to R and do the script from scratch, and yes, shame on me), anyway, as I was saying before Muggur irrupted in our blog, so far only 6 corrections needed among 1407 sampled individuals. Half of the hauls must be revised but as you can see there are only two outliers...

And today has been another smashing day: eight hauls with their CTDs, perfect the lot of them. We haven't seen a single redfish. Today it was the day for yellowtail flounder, American plaice, capelan, thorny skate and cod. We shot the first haul at 7 and the last one was hauled at 2130. Our positions for the day:

L25: 43º 25.56 -50º 47.35

L26: 43º 37.88 -50º 47.58

L27: 43º 43.20 -50º 34.66

L28: 43º 42.48 -50º 17.48

L29: 43º 32.00 -50º 27.74

L30: 43º 24.74 -50º 34.28

L31: 43º 20.10 -50º 22.89

L32: 43º 12.97 -50º 14.21

We have worked non-stop. See in the picture how crowded the deck was between noon and four (ship time). There is only one onlooker, besides the photographer. If you find him/her you win a capelin!!! And sorry folks, but we have to talk stomachs. A cod stomach was found with a hundred northern sandeels (similar to capelin but thinner and with more elongated bodies), 3 capelin and two big Chionocetes opilio crabs. Sorry about throwing this latin name at you just like this but I don't have an internet conection to look it up and am inmensely tired. If you are eating, don't look at the picture right now. And to think I was making fun the other day about the greedy dragon fish...

By the way: did anybody win the lottery? A reader told us that if she won she would come round in her new yatch. We should be easy to find with all the details we give here... the other clue is to follow the seabirds (). Birders, we saw very few birds during the crossing. Then Monday and Tuesday we were surrounded by these and fulmars. We also saw an albatross changing plumage from juvenile to adult -terminology probably very wrong but we have no birders on board and I am really, really bad at this. Then we spent Wednesday and Thursday nearly on our own, until the birds came back today. About our surroundings, there is little to say. We have been wrapped in fog nearly since departure. It has lifted ocassionally but for very short time. We could have all the whales in the Universe jumping about a 100 m from us and we would not see them.

Don't desert us during the weekend because we will find out!!! People in Vigo keep your agenda clear on Sunday to go to Samil...