Furthest Point South

Only 3 days left in the cruise and we have just reached the southernmost CTD station. We've paused just south of the sill of Davis Strait, a sort of foray into the deep end of the pool -- also known as the Labrador Sea. The CTD is dipping down to 2570 meters, but due to the currents, we may need to lay out 90 additional meters of line to get there. We're keeping an eye out for an 8-degree water mass which should be coming north around the southern tip of Greenland and possibly slipping west into the Labrador sea, but we haven't found it yet.

With so much wire to put out and a winch that runs at 60 meters per minute, the entire station may take 2 hours, whereas the shallow casts on the Canadian shelf were averaging 20 minutes. As there is very little for the CTD handlers to do between deploying the CTD and bringing it back aboard, it was a long, slow, and uneventful night. Inbetween the occasional bouts of activity in the snow on deck, I read a couple recent papers in the Journal of Physical Oceanography and learned how to play cribbage. The current chief scientist is from Cape Breton in Canada, where apparently everyone plays cribbage (in addition to playing fiddle and saying "new-fund-LAND"). I'm hoping to challenge him to another game during the next watch, but by then we'll be on the edge of the Greenland shelf, where our CTD casts will once again be short, shallow, and close together.