Back in Punta Arenas… so long and thanks for all the fish

June 11th

Well, that pretty much wraps things up. Today has been a day of packing, more packing, loading, more loading… all followed by the promise of a well-deserved party this evening!

We would like to finish with a few factoids from the cruise:

…we travelled approximately 2800 nautical miles…

…the biologists collected 1124 samples, representing 13 phyla, 11475 individuals, 1634 octocorals and 649 solitary scleractinians!!!

…the paleoceanographers collected 14398 solitary fossil corals (592 of which were subsampled on board), 106 kg of fossil stylasterids, 512 sponge samples, 418 live bivalves and 2159 fossil bivalves…

…we recovered 6 sediment cores comprising 333cm of mud…

…4210 km of multibeam bathymetric data were logged…

…according to Stian, 723 bowlines were tied (although I’m not quite sure if I should believe this one)…

…we ate 100kg bacon and 330kg beef… ate 3600 eggs and drank 500 pints of milk…

…we sent 6 GB of e-mails….

…we posted 35 blogs, and 180 photos (not including the daily photos)…

…thanks for reading them…and a huge thanks to Linda back in Maine for posting all of them!

It’s been a fantastic cruise – team work, hard work, wonderful people and quite a bit of luck has meant that we’ve had both a successful, and really fun, time. I’d like to thank Laura and Rhian, as well as all the Raytheon staff and ships crew, on behalf of the whole science party for making it all happen so smoothly!

By Kate

Weather: temperature 43 °F, windchill 23 °F, wind speed 10 knots, sunny intervals

Sunrise over Punta Arenas (M. Taylor).

Arriving at the dock (K. Hendry).

Kais, Tina, Andrew, Mariana and David packing up the dry lab… it looked so different a few days ago! (K. Hendry).

John and Ben loading the Tow Cam van (K. Hendry).