When you are rocking and rolling on a ship with large swells and high winds, it can be difficult just to collect water from the surface, much less from the ocean’s depths. On this cruise, we are using a CTD rosette to sample water below the ocean’s surface. The rosette has two important components. The first is an instrument package at the bottom that has sensors to measure Conductivity Temperature and Depth along with a few other sensors including oxygen and chlorophyll fluorescence. The second component is a rosette of 24 niskin bottles. We send the rosette out of the ship and as it is lowered into deep waters, the instruments collect data that are instantly transferred back up to a mission control room on the ship. There we look at the data in real time and make decisions on where to sample or “trip” the bottles as the CTD ascends back to the ship. After the rosette is back on board, there is usually a feeding frenzy of scientists around the rosette, sampling bottles in hand, ready to take water from as deep as 4000m (over 12000 ft!) back to their shipboard lab for analysis. So far, the CTD is running smoothly and our analyses are going well. At this point in the cruise we have stopped at just over half of our sampling sites- wish us well for the remaining sampling stations!