Legacy: 2016: LIFE BaĦAR Expedition

People are talking and commenting about it; there’s a rumour going around that today we’ll do a dive from the coast! For technical reasons, we couldn’t go out to sea using the boat, so we hired a car and set off to the north area of the island to carry out a dive in a … Read more

Just when everything was going fine, the ROV in and out of the water, rocky ocean floors, fish, sharks, sponges and coral reefs – getting into the swing of things – when all of a sudden we hear, “watch out there’s a rope in the water”. We thought that nothing too bad had happened to … Read more

Against all odds, at least my own, the campaigner on-board has told me it’s my turn to write the diary on a day when we’ve been to work according to plan. Let’s see what I can moan about now. Well, anyway, conditions at sea improved compared to Friday, we carried out 3 dives with the … Read more

There are 14 of us on-board here in Gozo so it’s important to have a moment to ourselves to unwind. Most of the crew here does that by doing some kind of sport. When we sleep at port, we run and/or swim before the working day starts. And if there’s a spare moment when we’re … Read more

Today has been full of visits on-board the Ranger. The kind of visits that come and go, the kind that surprise you and the ones you long for. This morning, we had an unusual visit as a voice on-board shouted out loud, “Kike there’s a strange bird on the bow”! A huge, brown-coloured bird walked … Read more

Normally there are 13 crew members on-board the Ranger, which means that each one of us will write four diary entries during the two-month Malta expedition. That is enough to be able to tell you things about the expedition from many different perspectives. In my last diary entry, I gave you a summary on how … Read more

I’m starting my diary entry sitting on the bow of the Ranger, looking towards the horizon, ten miles from the coast of Gozo, with the ROV in 500-metre-deep water. It’s a little break from spending hours labeling all the hundreds of videos we’ve made over the last few days. I still have such vivid memories … Read more

All research methods involve some degree of impact on the environment and all researchers are aware of that. Although it is practically impossible to cause no harm at all, for example, when lifting sediments, the sampling we do with the ROV is the least intrusive method there is to study the deep sea. Even so, … Read more

A day on-deck unfolds like the sea itself. This morning the groundswell from the last few days was still washing around, with big, slow and unruly waves that are not entirely on our side for using the ROV properly. As the day went by, the sea calmed, just like our energy levels. In the last … Read more

So, today it’s my turn to write the on-board diary. Just a couple of words on superstitions. In the olden days, and, not so long ago in fact, due to a lack of information and knowledge, almost everyone who worked with or related to nature used to be superstitious to be able to answer to … Read more