Microbial Lifestyles

The second week of the expedition was only marginally easier than the first. Following the rough weather of the first week, we have been motor-sailing towards Mauritius with some beautiful sunny skies as the wind has not been fully with us and we had some time to make up. We saw the biggest pod of blue whales I have ever seen (actually the only pod I have ever seen) and it adopted Indigo as a new member of the clan coming alongside at less than 50 meters. A little scary but beautiful. Of […]

That has been a hard first week on the boat!We started out of Port Elizabeth with some decent weather, calm seas and sunshine. There are plenty of cargo ships heading in and out in roughly the same direction as us so we need to keep a constant eye on the radar. Our automated information system tracks when one is near, gives us info about name, size and what it is carrying and warns us if we are going to collide, that's always handy!We started sampling as soon as we hit the international […]

Well it's not as romantic as sailing through the Indian Ocean on a yacht, but I am also overseas this week. I flew into California yesterday, and I am currently at SRI International in Silicon Valley to attend the annual Steering Committee meeting for the EcoCyc and PortEco projects. I have been a collaborator on the EcoCyc project since 1996, and later this year we will have to write our NIH grant renewal, so hopefully we can get good feedback from our Steering Committee.There was some […]

Day 1We finally made it out of Port Elizabeth on the evening of the 29th May following delays of all sorts. We are now well underway on our route to Mauritius. We will start taking water samples when we are out of the 200 nautical miles range. On our first day the weather was gorgeous, 15 kts of wind and we caught our first yellowfin tuna (5 kg) on the line that we trawl ‘just in case’. The tuna then magically transformed into sushi that we all very much enjoyed. You can't get any […]

The Indigo V crew is getting used to life on board the ship and late night watches. We have been sailing along the African coast in the sunshine.The weather has been reasonably good so far but the wind is blowing head on from the travelling direction, which means we have been motoring for most of the way so far.After a short refuel and fixes in Port Elizabeth, we will sail out of territorial waters and start the main bulk of the scientific sampling all the way through to Mauritius.Martin