Thursday 22^nd April

Our final newsletter from the ship. We arrived in Stanley at dawn this morning and already people can be found singing 'we're coming home' in unguarded moments. Overall it has been a more successful cruise than we would have dared to hope for, so we are very pleased. We have had our share of good fortune, but primarily the success is owed to everyone's hard work. The dataset will keep us out of mischief for several years to come. After leaving South Georgia, we completed a set of CTD stations to the Maurice Ewing Bank, repeats of the ones done by BAS for several years. It will be interesting to see how the ocean properties vary from year to year. This will be the first time that the section has been done with tracer chemistry, and measuring the whole water column from surface to sea bed. Our final section was westward along the top of the Falkland Plateau, where we sampled again the Antarctic Circumpolar Current that flows through Drake Passage and then turns north. Our last station, number 170, was completed on Wednesday evening, close to the Falklands.

For several days we were visited by cattle egrets, large white birds on impossibly spindly legs. They ought not to be found here, so have presumably been blown off course by recent storms. Sadly they all seem to die on the ship. Otherwise there has been very little wildlife this week - no whales or penguins, just the usual albatrosses. One of the most dramatic events of the week has been the loss of 5 of the sampling bottles on the CTD rosette frame. The CTD came inboard with 2 of its 24 bottles completely missing, a 3^rd broken in two and a further 2 cracked. These are huge bottles more than a metre tall and made of thick plastic so one can only imagine the force needed to break them apart. There are 2 possible explanations in circulation. First, Dave suggests a giant squid attack. Second, a bottle may have closed at the surface, and descended with air inside, so imploded at depth, taking out the bottles either side as well. Both explanations are something most of us have heard about but never seen. We leave it to our readers to decide which story they prefer.

The early part of the week brought us bad weather, and we were hove to for several hours on Friday and Saturday, unable to steam anywhere or do stations. However the weather improved for the last few days as we neared the Falklands, and we had some lovely mild days with plenty of sunshine. Visibility has been good and we had excellent sightings of Mars and Venus. The red planet was amazingly clear and definitely reddish orange in colour. We have enjoyed some beautiful sunrises and sunsets. They seem more spectacular at sea, because of the large expanse of sky, and the lack of light pollution.

It being the last week of the cruise, we have managed to fit in some socialising amidst the science, although the end-of cruise celebrations were muted by the fact that the last stations were so close to our arrival in port so there was a good deal of packing to do. On Tuesday we had the formal end of cruise dinner, when the officers wear their full uniforms. The catering staff did us proud with an excellent meal. On Wednesday after the last stations we held an RPC (Requests the Pleasure of your Company), a party to thank everyone on board for their hard work. The table tennis tournament reached its closing stages and Mikey beat Uli in the grand final.

On Tuesday we heard that the southbound Tristar from Brize Norton has been delayed at Ascension. We emailed to enquire whether its northbound journey was likely to be delayed sufficiently for us to get it. We found out that it would be returning north early Thursday morning, and that 6 places were available. Sadly most of us were unable to take up this opportunity since we have a huge amount of equipment to dismantle, the last salinity samples to analyse, and final data to archive. Five fortunate souls, Michel, John, Alberto, Mikey and Uli, were able to go. We arrived at our berth in Stanley at 6 am today, and they were whisked off in a bus straight to the airport. The rest of us are most envious. We leave the ship tomorrow, and have various expeditions planned until our homeward flight scheduled to depart on Wednesday.

Karen and Dave, Chief scientists, RRS James Clark Ross cruise 40, ALBATROSS

or as the chemists have renamed it, A Long Boring And Tedious Round Of Silly Stations

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