The Re-Sampling of Blanes By Karolina Ininbergs

Guests and crew for the Blanes sampling 2010. Up: Vanessa, Bea, Roy, Sarah, Charlie, On deck: Tea, Jeremy, Meri, Clara, me and Jeff.

May 26th 2010

After docking in Barcelona and picking up Jeff, who just finished the lake sampling with Chris up in the Pyrenees, we headed north-east towards Blanes Bay. We were also joined by Bea Diez, her PhD student Roy McKenzie, Meri Antó and Vanessa Balague from ICM, Barcelona. It was a beautiful sunny day and just enough wind to set the reacher for some smooth sailing.

After about three hours we reached the sampling site, located just outside the small fishing harbour in Blanes. Vanessa had just been up there the day before for the monthly BBMO sampling, and mentioned that it seemed to be a lot of plankton in the water. We did a quick plankton tow with our net, but when looking in the microscope the sample seemed dominated by unicellular plankton, hard to identify by morphology alone.

Sampling went smoothly and the ICM team was dropped off at the dock in Blanes, where their colleague Clara was waiting with a car to take them and their samples back to Barcelona.

Sorcerer II is now sailing north along the coast for an overnight trip to the next sampling station, which will be the last one in Spanish water until we head back at the end of summer.