Bay of Bengal, TN445, June-August 2025

By: William Ostergaard

Post #1:

After several days of exploring the beautiful Thai city of Phuket, we finally arrived at the deep-sea port.

The R/V Thomas G. Thompson is a large, almost 300’ vessel painted dazzling white. She dwarfed the smaller boats surrounding us. Many pallets full of scientific equipment sat to the side, waiting to be loaded aboard. Dr. Bourbonnais and her team had planned months in advance and packed the pallets to be shipped in May. It was very exciting to see that the equipment and other necessary materials had arrived! A truck drove up with an unimaginable quantity of food: meats, chocolate, wheels of brie, vegetables imported directly from the U.S. and China, all carefully selected to sustain a crew of over 50 scientists and mariners for several weeks at sea.

After boarding, I went directly to my room to unpack. The amount of storage space was surprising… I am leaving several entire drawers empty. I had met my shipboard roommate a few evenings before at a restaurant with several other scientists, including some professors and students from the local university.

The rest of the day was a flurry of activities: meeting the rest of the crew and scientific team, safety briefings, fire drills, and unpacking about 50 coolers’ worth of supplies, ensuring that each was securely ratcheted down in case of rough seas. My job on this cruise is nutrient analysis, which means I am responsible for testing seawater samples for key phytoplankton nutrients: nitrate, nitrite, phosphate, and ammonium. Because the constant rolling motion of the ship makes it nearly impossible to measure chemicals precisely at sea, we spent a full day at Prince of Songkla University in Phuket pre-measuring hundreds of chemical vials before we boarded. This preparation allowed us to avoid doing delicate measurements on board, and makes reagent preparation much faster!

Two days later, we were off sailing! Our destination: the Thai-Malay maritime border. There was an issue with some of the fuel, and the Phuket fuel barge was down, so the ship was forced to detour to Malaysia for refueling. We spent much of the day preparing for the science by making reagents and labeling vials before an early bedtime as we left the northern edge of the Malacca Strait back towards the Andaman Sea and eventually the Bay of Bengal.