This was a great day with very calm conditions. Unfortunately, the weather is however not very stable these days. At the end of the day shift, we were at ca 160 m depth. We had to change from the piston corer (HPC) to the extended nose (XTN), but were able to switch back again to piston corer a little bit later and had a good recovery. The MSCL assembly team arrived so that we can start measuring susceptibility curves on the load of sediment cores waiting in the cooling container.

The cooling container gets filled up with cores. During the day wind speed and wave heights increased at noon so we had to stop drilling and wait until 1 a.m. Drilling was continued using the extended nose tool. The core recovery becomes less but we are already at about 130 m sediment depth.

This was likely the best day so far. After the night shift went down to ca 30 m into the sediments of Lake Ohrid, the day shift enjoyed a beautiful day of sunshine and calm wind and made another 30 m. So we are at 60 m now. Significant colour changes in the cores likely indicate the shift from (the last ?) interglacial to glacial conditions and let us assume that we have cored the last ca 140 000 years now.

Drilling operations started and a 15 m core was drilled during the day shift.

At the end of a long, cold and wet day on the barge the spud in took place. After two runs where the liner was only filled with water the third contained 2.40 m of sediments setting the preconditions to start drilling at the DEEP site in a 12 h shift routine tomorrow.

Today, the position of the barge was adjusted so that we are only 150 m away from the target drill site in the central part of Lake Ohrid at a water depth of 250 m. After several small modifications and adjustments of the equipment, the barge is ready to go, so are the drilling team, and everybody is excited to get started. So if the weather allows us we will have the first test run tomorrow.