By Andrew Thurber - Expedition Chief Scientist, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
April 12, 2010
One may ask why a daily update about cruise off of Chile is being sent from Cost Rica. Due to the earthquake off of Chile, we could not offload our gear at Valparaiso as planned. So a couple of us (namely Monica Heintz and myself) had to fly down for a weekend of cranes and offloading to get our gear from the ship.
The deck of the research vessel (R/V) Melville was empty for only a few minutes before it was loaded up for the next cruise, with every inch of the deck covered with gear. Image courtesy of INSPIRE: Chile Margin 2010. Download image (jpg, 59 KB).
After a last-minute delay, that ended up lasting for four hours, the research vessel (R/V) Melville pulled up alongside the port, and docked tightly in between a Del Monte container ship (ripe with bananas) and a gypsum carrier, which kindly spent the day covering us and our gear with a never-ending supply of gypsum dust. The next science party was also on board the (R/V) Melville, and they had agreed to help offload the ABE container (now ABE-less) and all of our gear into another container to ship back to the United States.
Well, that was the plan, anyway. Our container never showed up so our gear ended up in a warehouse in Costa Rica. We have hopes that our gear and samples will eventually make it home.
