Heading Out

Amanda Pinson is sailing aboard the RRS Discovery COCO-VOC cruise to deploy BGC Argo floats

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6/11/2026

After a one-day delay, the RRS Discovery departed from Southampton, UK for the COCO-VOC cruise on Tuesday, June 9th. I’m Amanda, a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography as part of the Biogeochemical Ocean Observing and Modeling (BOOM) lab.

The RRS Discovery at port at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton.
The RRS Discovery at port at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. We mobilized and boarded the ship from here.

 As the Argo float ‘wrangler’ for this cruise, I’ll be riding along with the team to help deploy 5 BGC and 4 UK Core Argo floats (with no biogeochemical sensors) as we transect down to the cruise study region in Cape Verde, where I’ll be leaving the ship before they journey back up to Southampton along the coast.

Readying the ship to depart, or ‘mobilization,’ lasted about a week, where researchers prepared their instruments and sampling equipment to perform properly on the ship. With the floats loaded on board, all I needed to do was set up a water filtration rig which I will use to filter water collected from CTD casts for nutrients, HPLC, and POC. I’m set up in the Main Lab of the ship, which is also where CTD profiles are monitored during a cast.

Unpacking the sample filtering equipment in the Main Lab.

Unpacking the sample filtering equipment in the Main Lab.

Water filtering in action – everything needs to be tied down so it won’t fall off the table as the ship moves.

 Water filtering in action – everything needs to be tied down so it won’t fall off the table as the ship moves.

 We moved onto the ship on Sunday the 7th – everyone gets their own cabin. Now that we’ve left port, it will take a little under 2 days to make it off the shelf to the first CTD station and float deployment. Compared to depths of around 200 meters, waters off the shelf are more like 4000 meters deep, which is great for the Argo floats, which profile down to 2000 meters. Looking forward to sending the first BGC float on its way!

Saying goodbye to port as the ship heads out

Saying goodbye to port as the ship heads out.

Sailing past Hurst Castle with a cooperative sunset

Sailing past Hurst Castle with a cooperative sunset.

About the Author— Amanda Pinson is a PhD student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography) as part of the Biogeochemical Ocean Observing and Modeling (BOOM) lab, and is onboard as the the Argo float ‘wrangler’ for this cruise.