Longitude Quarterly · Pacific Rim Survey
Six weeks
along the drift.
A working record of the Kōura expedition — sixty-one stations between Wellington and the Kermadec trench, logged by hand and by sonar.
Section I — The Manifest
What a research hull carries when it leaves the shelf.
Every kilogram is argued over for months. The winch alone displaces more than the entire dry lab, and it is the one instrument nobody will agree to leave behind.
Provisioning note: fresh produce runs out on day nineteen. After that, the galley works from the freezer manifest and the mood of the ship changes measurably.
- Displacement2,140 t
- Crew & science party34
- CTD casts completed188
- Core samples retained413
- Winch cable deployed96.4 km
- Fuel burned310 kL
- Days of full swell11
Section II — The Profile
The seafloor, read left to right, exactly as we crossed it.
Section III — Selected Entries
Four nights that the watch officer thought worth writing down.
The log is kept in pencil, in a hardback book that has survived three refits. What follows is transcribed without correction.
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Bioluminescent bloom, port quarter
Roughly forty minutes of continuous glow off the beam. Nobody on watch had seen it hold that long. Two cameras out, neither useful.
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Winch brake replaced at station 33
Six hours lost. Deck crew worked through the swell warning. Cast resumed at 23:50 and recovered clean core to 4,900 m.
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Deepest cast of the survey
7,412 m at the trench axis. Pressure housing came back intact; the sediment was finer than the 2019 transect predicted.
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Last station secured
Gear lashed, labs cleaned, freezers sealed at −80 °C. Course set west-south-west for Wellington, 1,640 nm remaining.
Section IV — Science Party
Fourteen disciplines, one corridor, forty-one days.
| Berth | Name | Discipline | Stations | Watch |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A-02 | Dr. Neve Ashworth | Physical oceanography | 61 | 00–04 |
| A-05 | Tomás Reinholt | Sediment geochemistry | 54 | 04–08 |
| B-01 | Dr. Halina Boros | Benthic ecology | 47 | 08–12 |
| B-07 | Ren Matsukawa | Acoustics & mapping | 61 | 12–16 |
| C-03 | Adaeze Nwoye | Trace metals | 38 | 16–20 |
| C-09 | Iver Sandvold | Instrument engineering | 61 | 20–24 |
Full roster, cruise report and raw station data are released under an open licence ninety days after return to port.
Section V — Landfall
The next hull leaves in November.
Dispatch №15 follows the Kōura south into the Ross Sea ice edge. Four issues a year, posted flat, never folded.