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Net Maneuvers

WHOI biologist Gareth Lawson; Pete Liarikos, Bosun on R/V Armstrong; Mike Jech, scientist at the NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center; and Armstrong crew member Connor McDonnell(L to R) manage a net. “We were deploying a midwater trawl, which involved manually maneuvering it over the stern,” said Lawson. “With a mouth opening of 18 x 24 feet, it’s ‘small’ for a fisheries net, but very large for a research vessel! Typically fish trawls are deployed with two winches, so this operation required modifications for use with Armstrong‘s single trawl winch. Deployments and recoveries went off very smoothly, sampling larger fish and invertebrates to ground-truth the cruise’s acoustic surveys.”(Photo by Carin Ashjian, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)