What Happened to Sorcerer II?!?!
The last time I wrote a Sorcerer II blog was in November when we set sail from Spain to cross the Atlantic Ocean. For all of you that have been worried that we have been at sea for 8 months, relax we made it!! Over the next few days I will update everyone on what has happened and the upcoming plans for Sorcerer II.
First off, the Atlantic Crossing.On November 13th we left Gibraltar and on November 17th arrived in the Canary Islands.
After a day on Lanzarote Island we sailed overnight to Las Palmas on Gran Canary, collecting two samples on the way. We stayed in Las Palmas waiting for a good weather window for the big crossing. During that time we traded out crew members, fully stocked the boat with food, supplies and fuel. We also had time to meet our collaborators from the University of Las Palmas. I gave a group from the University a tour of the boat and showed them the sampling equipment.
On November 22nd we took off for the USA USA USA! There was one problem, a huge storm in the Northern Atlantic. To avoid the storm we had to go much more south then originally planned, also this storm sucked all the wind up north, so we had very little wind to sail with. With no wind and a much longer sail than planned, we couldn’t make it directly to Florida…well we could have but we would have run out of fuel and food! So on December 8th we arrived in St. Thomas USVI. For two and a half weeks we motored our way from the Canary Islands to the USVI sampling and fishing. Total fish count was 8 Mahi Mahi, 3 Wahoo and 2 Yellow Fin Tuna.
One more thing, during this crossing the following things all happened, the strange part is they all happened within 24 hours of each other!
- Little generator broke (not a big deal we have 2 generators), both were up and running in a few hours
- Auto-pilot went out..........could have been a real pain because we would have had to hand steer 24 hours a day for the rest of the trip, this was on day 8, but it got fixed in a few hours as well.
- Water maker went down.........no water for showers, dishes and oh yeah no drinking water......once again got fixed in a few hours
- Mainsail ripped, this was fixed a few days later, but for those days we were pretty rolly out there with no mainsail to keep us steady.
- Busted pipe in my head (bathroom).........funny thing is I woke up around 4 am dreaming about waves then I woke up and still heard the waves; it was the water going back and forth in my bathroom floor!
- And the big daddy of them all........a full out engine room fire!! Not just smoke or steam.......we are talking flames and extinguishers! It was taken care of and the engine was up and running about 4 hours later.
On December 20th 2010 Sorcerer II arrived in Florida. This wrapped up the 2009/2010 Europe Expedition. During this time we collected 213 samples, filtered over 51,000 liters of water from 13 countries. DNA from all 3 size fractions from the 213 samples have been extracted, although not all will be sequenced right away, a majority have been sequenced or are schedule to be sequenced this year. I will write a future blog on the sequencing status of these 213 samples and how we are working with many collaborators from Europe to work up this data set. I will also write about what has been going on with Sorcerer II since December 2010 and future plans for her.