R/V Wecoma Cruise: Last Few Days

I was on the night shift from 5pm to 5am. This is one of the few pictures of me working during daylight.

Me

Captain Rick

Science Crew and the Captain

R/V Wecoma Cruise: Getting the Sediment Samples

Everyone kept their computers in the dry lab. That is also where we set up our navigation screen, which displays information about our location and the water depth.

We processed all of the cores in the wet lab. It got pretty muddy in this lab.

We collected box cores for most of our sediment sampling. The whole thing weighs about 200 lbs. The cores taken were between 20 and 50 cm long.

Then we took a smaller sub-core from the box core and sampled the sediment at every 1 cm.

We also used this piston corer to collect sediment cores that were up to 7 meters long. The weight at the top is 1000 lbs of lead, which drives the corer into the sediment.

Precious core

We also collected Kasten cores. Kasten is German for box. These cores were usually two meters long.

When the Kasten cores were collected and filled with wet mud they were extremely heavy. We all had to lift together to get them in the lab and on the counter to be processed. That's teamwork.

R/V Wecoma Cruise: Sights Along the Way

There were all kinds of cool things to see during our cruise.

Baby bird on the dock

During the first few days we had some pretty rough seas. But then it settled down and we had great weather the rest of the cruise.

Look a whale!

Humpback whale

Porpoises

Seals

Sunrise by St. George Lighthouse

Dunes near the Umpqua River