In the summer of 1954, I accepted a position as an oceanographer at the Marine Science Institute in Djakarta, Indonesia. When I arrived in November 1954, I found out that all the Dutch scientists had left—I was the only scientist and the director of the institute. I had a fine, almost new research vessel, the 200-ton Samudera. It had only six Nansen bottles, one bathythermograph, and two winches with about 1500 m of wire. I also inherited a well-established “ship-of-opportunity” program, which collected salinity samples over the entire Southeast Asian waters from Hong Kong to Singapore, to Jakarta, to Ambon. We issued monthly maps of surface salinity for the region. Surface salinity offered much insight into the advection of water in this area, which has such a pronounced annual reversal of the circulation.

Wyrtki, K. 2005. Discovering the Indonesian throughflow. Oceanography 18(4):28–29, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2005.02.

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