We have now finished the survey, docking on Saturday, ready for lots of Easter eggs and sleep!!

The survey went well, completing 81 fishing stations and covering approximately 2000 miles.

The results can be seen via the survey report, which will follow shortly. For now I am off for some more catch up sleep and chocolate.

Happy Easter from 5/12

We fished close to the Cornish coast, completing six stations, with our first early night, finishing before 9. We celebrated this by watching a film, beginning with a horsey film (which was a bit too skippy for us!) so we settled on an action film.

We had an unusually large catch of spawning spiny starfish Marthasterias glacialis today, which made quite a mess of the deck! This starfish is a hermaphroditic and breeds in the spring-summer, spawning planktonic brachiloraia.

We also had our first sighting of common dolphins, with approximately 10 in the pod, including young calves. Leah captured some of these with her amazing photography skills, which you can see below.

We began fishing west of the grid, in the mid channel and continued along the south coast, close to Falmouth. It was nice to finally see some land and be able to make phone calls home. We had quite an exciting drill today, learning how to steer the boat using the emergency steering and we had a refresher on pyrotechnics. 

Paul Bouch is part of our scientific team on board and he has included some information about himself.

As a member of the plankton ecology team, my work at Cefas involves analysing plankton samples from all around the UK. My focus is on zooplankton, so traditionally we will be identifying fish eggs and larvae, or copepods and larval invertebrates. The reason behind this work is varied but it may be used for fish stock estimates or environmental assessment work. Normally, a lot of my time is spent using a microscope to identify species, so it's been a refreshing change to study fish and various other animals that are hundreds of times larger. It's also been fascinating to see the adult forms of all the larval fish that I'm used to seeing in the lab. Sometimes species can be virtually impossible to separate when larvae, so it's really interesting to see the differences between them as adults. A few years makes a massive difference to most of them! 

It is a sad farewell 'guess the fish of the day' today, demonstrated by Sven.

Today James has included some information on his work at Cefas and the work he is carrying out on this trip.

Hi,I'm James and I am a Plankton Taxonomist and have worked at Cefas for ten years. I am currently taking ringnet samples for the Memo project, this project aims to study the impacts of the invasive Mnemiopsis Leidyi or American Comb Jelly. Please see the link below for further information. http://www.ilvo.vlaanderen.be/Default.aspx?alias=www.ilvo.vlaanderen.be/memo

Here is todays 'guess the fish of the day'

We began fishing north of the Hurd deep, in strata 9, with a good catch of plaice, tub gurnards and monks. We then worked through stations heading south towards the French coast, continuing to get good catches of plaice, sole, monk, brill, turbot and a number of marbled electric rays.

We also caught several congers today which led to fun and games for the deck hands to try and wrangle them under control. We had quite a following of sea birds today, of which Leah kindly took a photo of for you all to see.

She has also included some information about her role at Cefas.

Hi, my name is Leah and I have been at the lab nearly 3 years, I started in E&E in the ecotoxicology lab. I have been in the fisheries division for a year and a half now. I am more used to working with dead fish than alive as I spend a lot of time sampling fish on the markets across the UK.

We came together as a team today for the 'guess the fish of the day!'

We started on the French coast, heading north towards the Hurd deep, completing 8 fishing stations and one water station (W7).

The catches have been fairly stable over the last few days, consisting mainly of rocks, kelp, wrasses, gurnards and dog fish. However, we did have an exciting catch of a juvenile Marbled Electric Ray (Torpedo marmorata), that we were able to release in good health.

Today's Guess the Fish of the Day is modelled by the lovely Joana

Another successful day fishing and 6 more tows down. We have been fishing in and around the Channel Islands today on rocky grounds. The tides around here are notoriously ferocious and often exceed 5 knots in strength, creating a challenging environment to fish in.

The catches have mainly been made up of starfish and urchins, with lots of brittle stars (also called creepers). We have also had some good catches of black sea breams and wrasses.

Everyone is still in good spirits, but some maybe taking drastic steps to get home!!!!

 New Blog Quiz - Guess the fish of the Day.

Hopefully (as long as the internet connection on board remains stable) we hope to periodically give you the chance to join in the fun that we have on board. Today Ian, a long term fan of the TV show 'Give us a Clue', is pretending to be a fish! Can you guess which one it is?

 Answers on the back of a postcard to Cefas Endeavour

Welcome to Endeavour 5/12. We have 9 scientists on the survey; Sven, Ian, Rob, Joana, Leah, Paul, Dave , James and me (Jo). James will be doing some plankton work into the late evening and helping us in the fish room during the day.

Cefas Endeavour left Lowestoft at 11am on Saturday and we are currently working in the Western English Channel. We hope to continue heading west over the next few days picking up as many stations as possible, whilst the weather is nice.

The survey uses two 4m beams, one with a blinder in (a small 20 mm net, which sits inside the cod end) and the other rigged commercially.

The weather is pretty tropical, so fingers crossed it stays like this. Everyone seems to have settled in really well and despite a few hick ups with the boat we are now working around the grid nicely. We managed to complete 5 successful stations today and hope for the same tomorrow.

Not much to report on the fishing, except we had fully egg bound poggies (Agonus cataphractus), they were huge!! This is as exciting as it gets for today but hopefully it will pick up over the next few days.

It's been a busy day today, settling in, but hopefully I will be able to include a bit more information and a survey map in the next day or two.

Night from us for now.

For those who have been following us you will already know we have docked in Alexandra Docks in Kingston-upon-Hull.

We completed all our work at our four targeted sites (Compass Rose, The Chalk Reef, Rock Unique and Farnes East) on Tuesday morning . It was then decided to steam to Hull a day early  to allow some maintenance to be carried out on the ship before she sails again later this week.

So the stats that I promised.

We have collected 200 Hamon grab samples, carried out 96 camera deployments  and surveyed 516 km of the seabed using Multibeam.

Thanks to all the Cefas team for all their hard work

Clement, Manuel, Faye, Tim, Marc and Paul (The night shift, AKA The young'uns)

Ken, Rob, Mary, Dan and Clare (The day shift, AKA The A'geing or SAGA team)

The team names came from everybody on the nightshift being under 30 and everybody on the day shift being over 30 years of age.

Thank you also to all the P&O ships crew.

I've really enjoyed writing the blog during this survey, I hope you have all found it interesting and gained a small insight into life on Cefas Endeavour.

 Take care Paul

We have had a very eventful day with our planned Man Over Board drill and also a 65th birthday.

I will start with the Man Over Board Drill.

Five minutes before the muster alarm was sounded Jeff, the Over Board Dummy, wearing a Personal Locator Beacon (PLB) was launched over the side of the vessel by Ted.

When the muster alarm sounded everybody dropped what they were doing and walked over to the muster station. During the muster the man over board alarm was sounded (3 long blasts of the ship's whistle or alarms). Within 6 minutes the rescue boat was launched. Dummy Jeff was already out of sight, so Terry (The Master) used the PLB direction finder to give the rescue boat a range (from the signal strength of the beacon) and a bearing. You will all be happy to know that within 10 minutes of the alarm being sounded Jeff was safely back onboard.

Please follow the link to watch a short movie of the drill.

Toady was also the 65th birthday of the Senior Fishing and 1st Mate Roly. Steve the Chef made him a suuuperb birthday cake which was decorated with candles and sparklers by our lovely stewardess Aggie.

Happy Birthday Roly and thanks for the cake.

One of the advantages of working the night shift is that you get the opportunity to watch any sporting events that happen to be on TV during the day (if you can keep your eyes open after a 12 hour shift!).

Today France played England in the Six Nations so banter between representatives of the two nations on board Clement (France) and Rob, myself, Ken and Dan (England) started pretty early.

At 15:00 the lounge contained a representative from five of the Six Nations (unfortunately Italy were not represented). Our Irish and Welsh contingent were sitting smugly after their victories yesterday while everyone else was starting to feel the tension. International Marine Signal Flags were placed up in the lounge (The French Tricolor was represented by The letter T turned on it's side and the St Georges cross by the number 8).

It was a tense 80 minutes but it was hand shakes all round after the game.

While the night shift were watching the rugby the day shift were working hard collecting samples and carrying out camera deployments within the Farnes East rMCZ. We are making excellent progress with nearly a third of the grid completed.

Come back tomorrow to see how the planned Man Over Board drill goes.

We have now completed our survey at Rock Unique and have now moved west to the Farnes East rMCZ.

Before we arrive on site all our sampling positions have to be uploaded to several systems which include one of our ships navigational aids (TRANSAS) and our own Hydrographic logging system TOWER Navigation. We all insist on having a map printed out which shows all the survey stations on, so as we progress through the survey we can cross off each station. It is also very useful for plotting the order that we visit each station.

I think the real reason we like the maps is because we all enjoyed doing dot-to-dot puzzles when we were younger (see for yourselves).

I will blog again soon with our progress. 

Hope you enjoyed spotting the fish. There was a fish in all the pictures except the first and last picture. I didn't want to put empty pictures in as I thought this would be unfair, but Rob and Clare made me!

We have reached half way in our survey. So far we have surveyed Compass Rose rMCZ, carried out a drop camera survey on a previously mapped rocky habitat and we are just finishing the last couple of underwater camera deployments at rMCZ Rock Unique (see arrow on map). While sampling one of the stations at Rock Unique we collected and returned two Arctica islandica specimens. Arctica islandica is a very long lived (up to 400 years old) bivalve mollusc.  One specimen collected off Iceland was found to be 374 years old! This means that specimens found today could have been alive during the reign of Charles I (1625-1649) and 200 years before Queen Victoria came to the throne (1837). For more information visit Dan's JNCC blog.

This species has been listed as a Species of Conservation Interest at other sites where they are known to occur within the rMCZ network. Currently it is not a conservation priority at this site but with the evidence collected during this survey it may be added to the list of conservation features for rMCZ Rock Unique.

Once we have completed our last camera deployments we will be transiting west to rMCZ Farnes East where we have a further 98 planned sample stations.

Hope you all have a good weekend. Come back soon to find out how we are getting on during the second half of our survey.

I have had several requests for a larger image of the Monkfish Tim photographed yesterday.

Here you go...

The 'spot the fish competition' will follow shortly

Good luck to you all, answers tomorrow.

I bet you have all being dying to see some of the lovely pictures that we have taken of the 'chalk reef/rock' I mentioned yesterday.

Today we have being carrying out a drop camera survey on some acoustically mapped rocky areas of the sea bed between two of our rMCZ sites (Compass Rose and Rock Unique).

The rocky areas have already been surveyed using multibeam and then mapped by colleagues back at the Cefas lab (Markus and Dave). The chalk areas are thought to be within the grey/blue patches on the map below and our camera stations are the pink circles.

Well I guess I can't keep you waiting any longer so here's what we found...

At one of our stations we found extensive areas of rock while at the others the rock was quite patchy. From the photographs below you can appreciate why rocky environments are so important. The variety and number of species that rocky seabeds provide habitat for is amazing.

I hope you can all see the Monkfish (it is so well camouflaged) in the first photograph. Tim managed to capture the picture this morning just after breakfast. If you look very carefully you can see the lure hanging just above it's mouth (it looks like 3 yellow balls stuck together) which it uses to entice prey in. You can understand now why the other common name for this fish is the Anglerfish. The stalk of the lure is actually casting a shadow on the fish's head.

For more info follow the link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/monkfish

Pop back tomorrow to take part in our 'Spot The Fish Competition'

The weather has been extremely kind to us over the last 24 hours and as I type we are now deploying the camera sledge at our last station  for the Compass Rose site (stats to follow).

From the title you will see that I am going to reveal a little bit of what life is like onboard. One of the most social parts of the day is when both shifts get together at lunch time. Throughout both shifts, conversation often revolves around food. On all the research surveys I have ever been on food always seems to become a huge pre-occupation.  It offers a moment of rest and food can have a huge impact on morale.

Today has been no different.

Chilli meat balls and rice followed by short bread with chocolate sauce (a particular favourite of Ken's) for lunch and then roast lamb and trifle for tea.

To help burn off all this food (in addition to the long hours on deck) some of the crew and scientists visit the Cefas Endeavour Gym. This is in the bowels of the ship so makes for an interesting experience especially while using the treadmill. With very little warning, the roll of the ship often turns a leisurly jog into an extreme uphill sprint!

Now we have finished this site (Compass Rose) we are going to head North to an acoustically mapped area of chalk reef to carry out a drop camera survey. Hopefully tomorrow I will have some superb pictures of the animals that live in and on chalk reefs.

The weather forecasters were certainly right!

The winds increased to 50 knots and blew all night from the North. The sea state soon deteriorated and put a stop to to our hamon grab and camera survey. We decided to concentrate on our planned multibeam survey until the weather improved, however, we soon found that we could only collect good quality data in one direction (south) running with the weather. This evening the weather and sea state have improved sufficiently for us to resume grabbing. With the weather set to carry on improving we will soon be back on track.

Koen has kindly produced a map so you can all now see where we are working and also see all the rMCZ's we have successfully surveyed to date (in green).

All the grabs we have taken so far have been very sandy, so we have not yet managed to match some of the excellent pictures taken during our earlier surveys in the Irish Sea.

This has not stopped people fighting to take control of the underwater stills camera so they can get the opportunity to snap the best photograph of the trip. We are all hoping that the chalk reef we are planning to survey later in the trip will provide us with the chance of getting the winning shot of the trip!

I will blog tomorrow to let you know how some of the scientists and crew onboard counteract (justify) the copious amounts of lovely food (especially puddings) they eat while on survey.

I'm pleased to report that our work has been progressing really well. We have collected lots of Multibeam data, Hamon grab samples and some under water video footage since I last blogged.

When we arrived at the North of the site we were contacted by several vessels (see below the guard vessels are in green) that were guarding an exposed gas pipeline. These vessels enforce the exclusive zone, a very improtant job which prevents any damage to the pipeline occuring.

After Roly and Hugh (officers of the watch) had  chatte d with the captain of the guard vessel we were passed some positions which detailed the route of the gas pipeline. We were also informed that there was an exclusion zone of 1km which prevented sampling the seabed and an exclusion zone of 2km for anchoring. After we had received the position we had to plot the route of the pipeline into our Geographic Information System (GIS) which we use for planni ng our  surveys. After the pipeline route and exclusion zone (in blue) were plotted (thanks to Dan) we soon realised we would have to move some of our sampling stations to avoid entering the exclusion zone.

 

After we had moved our positions we checked with the guard vessel that it was ok for us to proceed with our sampling programme. After a few minutes we were given the go ahead. While we were carrying out our multibeam survey of the area we got some images of the gas pipeline on the seabed.

We are carrying on with our survey and hope to finish it  in the next couple of days. However the forecast doesn't look too favourable so we will have to keep our fingers crossed that it doesn't effect the quality of the acoustic data or stop us being able to deploy our grabs.

I will blog again tomorrow to let you know how we get on though as I write we are are starting to roll around a little more than earlier and we have just received gale warnings for later tonight!   

After two weeks on-shore, which has involved a lot planning for this next trip, I have now re-joined the vessel to carry on the MCZ site survey work, this time in the North Sea. Our first site is called Compass Rose which is situated due East of Robin Hoods Bay off the North Yorkshire coast.

This rMCZ is named after a nautical figure (Compass Rose) which is used to display the cardinal directions (North, South, East and West) on navigational charts. It is referred to as a rose due to the very ornate figures used in early compassess. 

Our plan at this site is to carry out a Multibeam survey targeting the predicted sediment boundaries between sand and rock and then to carry out Hamon grab and underwater camera surveys of the seabed. It will be interesting to see if we encounter different animals to those that we have already seen while woking in the Irish Sea and the Western Channel. 

We sailed at tea time on Friday straight into a very foggy North Sea. There was less that 100m visibility which meant the bridge crew had to double their watch and also have the fog horn sounding every two minutes (1 long and 2 short blasts). It is very erie in the fog because you can see from our ships' radar that there are other ships out there but you can't see them (not even their lights). Every now and again you will hear another faint fog horn in the distance. It sounds like the ships are talking to each other!

I will blog again tomorrow to let you know if the fog has lifted and how we are getting on with our survey of the Compass Rose rMCZ.