We conducted field work at Lake Bolshoe Toko in the first week of April 2013 as part of the expedition “Yakutia 2013” as a joint campaign of the North Eastern Federal State University (NEFU, Russia, Yakutsk) and the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI, Germany, Potsdam). Coring equipment was brought by trucks onto the lake. We used a Jiffy ice auger (250 mm) to open holes through the 80 cm thick ice cover as conduits for scientific instruments and coring equipment to the unfrozen water column and bottom sediments. A portable Echo sounder (HONDEX PS-7 LCD) gave estimates of water depth and verified ambiguous values with a calibrated rope. We used UWITEC piston and gravity corer to retrieve sediment cores. Core PG2208 was retrieved by repeated coring of sub-sections at a water depth of 68.3 m. To avoid core loss due to the piston coring technique, parallel 3 m core sections were retrieved with an overlap of 0.5 m. Compaction was reduced by leaving the cores for tension release for several hours after retrieval.