Recent messages listed first.

hey folks, this 1730, 8-27 e-mail will be my last log-on till we sail on the 8th, unless there is a phone wire at the dock. we should be able to be reached through my cell which is 409-939-7252
Thanks, capn.dodiii

Friday August 27, 1999 07:20CDT We have finished Line 7 Station 17 and are heading north on our final line. We have taken the water samples Ann requested yesterday and we will prepare a report on when they were taken and the results of the salinity and nutruient analyses.

The winds have lightened and seas are now back down to 1-3 ft.

Out ETA remains tomorrow morning early.

Norman Guinasso

8/26/99

Finished station N6L06S11 at 19:16CDT tonight.

Estimated ETA at Panama City is about 8:30CDT Saturday morning.

Norman

8/26/99 06:30CDT

We have finished line 5 and are now transitting to line 6.
Biggs, Waltman, and Kopesky were put off on a water taxi at Destin.
Weather has picked up a bit around thunderstorms with waves 2-3 ft.

Norman Guinasso

8/25/99 10:00L The Gyre is now at 28 20.8N 86 56.0S just having completed line 8.

Dr. Biggs has had a bout with kidney stones of such seriousness that the doctor advising the Captain has recommended evacuation.

We are proceeding immediately to to the end of line 5. We will do line 5 and put Biggs ashore ashore in Destin tomorrow at 6:00L.

Following Bigg's evacuation we will run line 6 and 7 in the reverse order as planned.

We expect our ETA in Panama City to be Saturday morning at 10:00L.

Norman Guinasso

Finished N6L08S06X at 22:21UTC 8/24/99. Everything working ok.

Woody could you send me a fax of the tracks of the tropical storms in the Atlantic?
I would also like to know if the buoys off Brownsville are reporting.

Norman

Survey continues. We finished Line 9 at 04:50 CDT this morning and are underway now across the inner shelf of the Big Bend to Line 8, which begins off Apalachicola FL. We'll do Line 8 today and then 7-6-5 on Wed-Thurs-Fri. Weather remains fair and we're averaging 9 knots underway.
-doug sends

We completed N6L09S05 AT 11:54L 8/23/99. Everything is working with no problems. We will be ready to go into Panama City at first light Saturday morning. Frank Kelly should arrange for our flatbed truck to be at the Navy base as soon as possible Saturday morning. Pam should check on our U-Haul truck specifically that it will be available, the address and phone number where it can be picked up, abd the earliest time on Saturday that we can pick it up. All is going well. Seas calm with some swell from the hurricane. Norman

Subject: R/V Gyre cruise report for Mon 23 Aug
Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 09:29:22 EDT
From: Gyremail@aol.com

We're progressing on schedule. We finished Line 10 last night and just started Line 9 with CTD in water depth of 1000 m before breakfast today. Wind is calm and ocean is flat. If clouds allow, we'll do MER casts between 10AM and 2 PM today. We got just one MER cast yesterday, when it was mostly cloudy. Everyone is in good spirits, especially John Walpert (he landed a 21 pound tuna yesterday). -doug sends (composed 7:30 CDT; 28 01N and 86 03W)

We're working our way seaward along Line 10 this morning, Sunday 22 August. We completed Line 11 just before 9 PM CDT last evening and CTD and other systems are working well. We anticipate finishing Line 10 today and then averaging one line per day Monday thru Friday. We still expect to arrive Panama City sometime early on Saturday 28 August. It's been overcast and rainy so no MER casts yesterday (or probably today) but CDOM survey by Bisman and Carlos is going fine. We are continuing to log TS data from both thermosalinograph systems and although at different depths below the waterline, the two agree with each other to within a few tenths of T and of S. -doug biggs sends (composed at 8 AM Sunday morning; we were at 28 29N and 83 25W

8/19/99 21:00 L

We have finished the first station N6L04S00C on line 4 a few minutes ago and are proceeding south to the second station on line 4. Piers and I have debugged the "working" wave programs and he is organizing the bottle data. The GERG surface salinograph is working and has been logging data since last night.

The winds are calm and we are averaging over 9 knots between stations.

We expect to be in port Saturday early should luck, speed and weather hold.

Email is working gyremail@aol.com

Norman

All equipment is working OK and we're finishing up Line 4 this morning with CTD in water depth of 1000 m at 7:30 CDT. Thermosalinograph in bow is logging as well as thermosalinograph in main lab; they agree with each other to within a few tenths in temp and salinity. Once we finish this line, we project it will take us about 20 h to run the 1000 m isobath to begin Line 11 off Tampa Bay (so we should start that line early on Saturday morning). USF guys got 3 MER casts yesterday; SAFIREs are logging data concurent with AC-9 and CDOM fluorometer. Breeze remains light and seas are negligible; we're averaging 9.5 knots underway. Moral is good and food is excellent. Thanks, Worth, for faxing altimetry map update for 16 Aug. The thermosalinograph and sfc chl data confirm that the warm ringlet in our field area is entraining MAR water and wrapping it east and south as predicted from the velocity field.
-doug biggs sends

We've completed all stations along Lines 1 and 2 without incident. Are today running inshore along Line 3. This morning we finished the closely-space four stations series in water depth of 1000m, 500m, 200m, and 100m; the CTD and rosette multisampler are working OK.

Transmissometer is behaving (no downcast v upcast hysterisis). John Walpert has today gotten the SeaBird software working to translate the hexadecimal data string from the thermodsalinograph mounted in the bow thruster room, so we now have a real-time display of T&S. John has begun logging this string (starting this morning) as a function of time (julian date); he's now working on trying to tie in a nav string. Data will be logged once per minute.

Capn Dyer this morning told me he now has email workingl; so I should be able to send future cruise reports by email.

doug biggs sends

At 18/Aug/99 15:03 GMT they had finished the CTD cast at N6L01S01. Everything appears to be working as expected - no problems reported. The gyretamu@aol.com mailbox still doesn't work for incomming or outgoing email but a fix is expected soon. Meanwhile one can send a fax to Norman's satellite fax onboard. (Matt, Ann, Steve, or Agnita have this number).

We finished N6 Line 1 just after 10 AM this morning and are presently headed NE to begin Line 2 at L02S00C there. Breeze is light and seas are low and ship is making good speed (10+ knots). SAIL loop is up and running and logging data; the thermosalinograph from R/V Powell is also installed (in the bow thruster room) and we'll begin logging data from it later today.

At our deepwater test CTD station last evening (water depth 1075m just east of Miss Canyon) we were in northern fringes of Eddy H. There was a > 10 psu gradient in sfc salinity between box coring site (N5CORE00C) and this test station (N6TEST00C) which corresponded to an order of magnitude gradient in sfc chl (1.7 ug/L at box coring site, decreasing to 0.16ug/L at piston coring site).

Box coring and piston coring both have gone well:

We ended up doing box and gravity coring for Jeff Morin at 28deg 57min N and 89deg 53minW (we couldn't go to Jeff's original target coordinates because of ship activity there). Waster depth at this alternate site was 35m; bottles tripped at 33m there confirmed near-bottom hypoxia (1.3ml/L, compared to 4.1 ml/L at 15m and 4.7ul/L at 3m below the surface). Jeff got good penetration into soft mud with 2 box and 4 gravity cores and he's presently sectioning and incubating and all that kind of stuff.

Dwight Gledhill made 4 attemps to piston core; first recovery got only 130cm of sediment and no hydrates. Second attempt recovered close to 5m of sediment; gas pockets were observed at various intervals downcore. All even numbered sections were extruded on to the deck but no hydrates were visible. All odd sections were archived and will be cut for chemical profiling on board. The third recovery (#3 was the charm!) recovered multiple hydrates. But all sediment was blown out of the core liner. Attempt #4 recovered near 5m of sediment plus hydrates at variuos intervals. Hydrates were preserved in liquid N2 from both 3rd and 4th attempts. Odd-numbered down core sediments intervals were archived for chemical analysis on board later this trip.

-doug biggs sends

NEGOM-06 cruise report for Tuesday 17 August 1999

I'm sending this ship report by fax since E-mail is not available yeet; we haven't been able to get modem connection to the ship's mailbox with AOL. Ship's email isn't yet working and Capn is so far communicating ship's business with Marine Ops by phone and fax.

At 8:00 CDT we reached 90W and by 8:30 CDT had started box and gravity coring for Jeff Morin. However, bottom proved to be too hard for box coring here (mud is brick hard about 4cm down) and we are now relocating 10 n miles to the NE. When we finish this box/gravity coring work, we'll move to the piston coring site on the slope (1000m water depth in Mississippi Canyon) and after piston coring is finished we will do our test CTD there. We will then transit to N065L01S07C and at last be able to begin survey lines for NEGOM-6.

Weather is goot (breeze remains light and seas are low) and we're all anxious to get started on NEGOM-COH work.

Doug sends
local time 08:50: underway and now at 28 45N, 89 58W

(17/Aug/1999 13:50 GMT 28.75N 89.97 W - mkh)