Not good still. Respect and longing for my Greenpeace photographer friends increases immensely (and it's already immense). Frantically pushing buttons (someone please send me a manual), I begin to wonder what exciting adventure they are currently snapping up. Great! Am happy to see the letter P replace M, auto-focus is back. And just in time. As I hear Penny, leaning over the side, yell out "20 metres to go", I get in position, then change position, and then change again.

All of a sudden I see a splash and I catch my first glimpse, Penny responds with a sigh of relief - it's still attached, we haven't lost it. She gets to work, taking it off the towline and hooking it to a pulley device. Paul and Tyrone help bring it on board. And, there it is - the ingenious 1 metre long, 190lb (87kg) Towfish.

Natasha and Penny soon adopt the 'fiddle around and see what happens' approach to taking it apart. It works, and we are now looking down at the nerve centre of our old friend the Continuous Plankton Recorder - And, guess what? It does, kind of, look like a toilet roll on a stick. And I have the photos to prove it.

The "fiddle around and see what happens" approach:

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

We will store the plankton in the fridge until we get to a place with postage stamps. They will be sent to SAHFOS, where scientists will peer down their microscopes, and assess the abundance of different species using the same analysis methods that have been in place for last 50 years. The data collected will then be used to address issues such as impacts of fisheries and climate change. Other recent applications of CPR data include providing information on harmful algal blooms, monitoring and documenting the spread of non-indigenous plankton species, and studying changes in marine biodiversity.

Now who said scientific research wasn't exciting!