Month: March 2014

                After a few days in Noumea, New Caledonia, the crew of the Thompson and the MoorSPICE scientists put our stern to the island and set course for the Solomon Sea.  It was hard to leave another tropical paradise, but we found solace in the fact that we’d be seeing more tropical paradises, albeit from a distance, throughout this cruise. 

                On our way out we saw sharks, sea snakes, and flying fish playing in the wake of our ship as we navigated our way through the 10 mile wide barrier reef.  Once we go to the edge of the reef we saw some pretty impressive Pacific Ocean waves crashing and some equally impressive wind surfers zooming over them.  It was quite strange seeing surfers out 10 miles from shore.

                The next few days we spent transiting to the first station.  The marine techs spent this time teaching the scientists how to be safe during deck operations, what to do during a CTD deployment and how to use some data processing equipment.  In turn, the scientists each taught us a little about their scientific missions during this cruise.  We had New Caledonian Biologists on board tracking the Nitrogen content in the water column, we had the LADCP ladies tracking the ocean currents and we had a mixture of French, Papua New Guinean, and Fijian physical oceanographers measuring the temperature, salinity and oxygen content in the water.  Thankfully for me, everybody spoke very clear English, but the trip certainly inspired me to start learning other languages. 

                The MoorSPICE cruise was similar to the Wave Chasers in that they both study physical oceanography of the southern Pacific Ocean with CTD casts and moorings; however this cruise was unique in several ways.  The most noticeable change was that the mooring’s buoys and instruments are smellier.  This was because they were in shallow water where there is a lot of biological activity.  The mooring lines had brought up a lot of jellyfish tentacles and barnacles when we recovered them.  My fellow marine tech, Tina, was even stung by one of these tentacles!

                Another unique aspect to this cruise is the narrow straits that we’re surveying.  We’re weaving the ship between almost all of the Solomon Islands and the currents and waves can get treacherous where the islands create a wind/current tunnel.  These currents can be up to 5-7 knots!  (If you need a reference, the top speed of the ship is ~12 knots).

                These straits are also heavily trafficked by cargo ships and fishing boats, so the mates driving the ship had a difficult time keeping the ship where it needed to be while avoiding other ships that were either heading towards us or the moorings we were working with (which sometimes laid out several kilometers behind the ship). 

                The heavy traffic and strong currents are the key suspects in the curious case of the missing mooring pieces.  While we were in the Vitiaz Strait, which had 7 knot currents, we had quite a problem with retrieving the moorings that were purposely well below the sea surface.  We put a transducer over the side and ‘pinged’ the mooring’s anchor releases.  This mooring had two releases, which are devices that wait to hear the ‘ping’ from the ship and then release the positively buoyant mooring from its anchor which sends it floating to the surface, and as far as we knew neither of them were working. 

                We tried for hours trying to triangulate the mooring’s position and get the releases to release.  However, we saw nothing at the surface.  A fear set in that the mooring had released and was floating downstream and out of sight.  This was a real possibility, because it was raining and very cloudy so our visibility was extremely low.

                Then, lo’ and behold, someone spots a float in their binoculars!  We all breathe a sigh of relief and the ship slowly heads in that direction.  We set up the back deck to retrieve the mooring and got the small boat ready to get in the water to hook a line into it (because the seas were too rough to hook it from the ship). 

                The visibility was so poor that it took until it was about 100 feet away until we realized that it was just a big piece of Styrofoam trash.  So since we were all standing there at the ready and being good stewards of the ocean, we dipped a net in the water and picked up this giant piece of trash.  That makes it one point for the environment, and zero points for physical oceanography. 

                 Afterwards, we eventually got the mooring releases to work and the recovery happened as planned.  However, the top portion of the mooring was missing!  There was a clean cut through a Kevlar line (you know, the stuff they make bullet proof vests out of), and our worst fear was partially realized, the top half of the mooring had washed away in the incredible currents of the Vitiaz Strait.  It took with it most of the data that it’s been collecting for the past year and a half.  This was the case for two of the moorings in the Vitiaz strait, but thankfully the third one was fully intact. 

                As I mentioned before, the cruise track had us going very close to islands in the Solomon Sea.  Some of these islands had a great deal of interesting history.  Everybody knows about the fight between Japan and the USA for Guadalcanal, and we were in the very waters where the naval battles took place right off the shore of the island!  We also went through the waters where John F. Kennedy’s ship sunk, when he was a soldier in World War II, and he swam to shore carrying an injured soldier with him. 

                There was no evidence of the war history apparent from the ocean, though.  The only indication of human life we saw was a few beachfront bungalow communities and some locals on canoes.  At nighttime we it was a light show with the huge bonfires on the shores of some of these islands and the fantastic lightning from the stormy straits. 

                Seeing land almost every day was an incredibly weird experience for me.  Waking up and walking outside, I usually expect only to see the infinite blue of the ocean and the sky.  However, on this cruise I was surprised all the time by majestic sea cliffs, rolling forested hills, giant cone volcanoes that ascend into the clouds, and even some coral reefs!  It was a wonderful change of pace from the usual endless seascape. 

               What’s more is that we saw sea life!  The deep blue water of the Pacific is barren compared to the turbulent, nutrient-rich waters of the coastlines.  We saw pilot whales, the frequent flocks of flying fish (one even landed on the deck), shark, squid, sun fish, blue runners (the one fish we actually caught!), the biggest schools of tuna I’d ever seen, and loads of dolphins that even jumped out of the water as high as 10 feet (up to the deck level)!

               All together it was a fantastic cruise that went like clockwork.  We had no major problems and the scientists got all of the data they needed.  I am now at the point where I have enough experience to run a vanilla cruise where we just do CTD’s and/or moorings and only some basic troubleshooting.  Hopefully my next cruise on the Kilo Moana will give me experience in another field of oceanography, because I’m still a padawan learner when it comes to being a full-time marine technician.

                So we arrived in Apia, Samoa on February 18^th with every piece of the Wave Chasers’ science equipment packed neatly in two large shipping containers ready to be lifted by a crane and carried to shore.  The amount of equipment in these containers was substantial, because all of the floats and buoys and sensors and kilometers of wire that were used on the moorings had to be sent back to the states.  This required one of the biggest cranes on the island which arrived in the morning to lift our containers off the deck, and thanks to organization and preparedness of Matt Alford and his team we should have been able to go snorkeling by the afternoon. 

                Well, not everything goes to plan while the ship is at sea, and the same applies to when the ship is docked.  The neatly packed containers full of mooring equipment must have been too much for the crane on the dock.  As it went to lift it off of the ship, the crane’s boom bent ~30 degrees due to the heavy load.  We broke it.  So now there was nothing to lift our containers to shore! 

                We ended up spending the rest of the day unpacking the containers and carrying everything across the gangway and placing it on the dock, piece by piece.  No snorkeling happened this day.  However, it was cloudy and I enjoyed my last chance to work with the Wave Chasers before we parted ways. 

                That night I said goodbye to my supervisors Brandi and Jason who were leaving the next morning.  I also got to know my new supervisors a little bit more.  Patrick A’Hearn replaced Brandi as the lead marine tech and is also from the University of Washington in Seattle.  He knows an awful lot about marine science and is very familiar with this ship.  Tina Thomas replaced Jason as the second marine tech. She had worked as the marine tech at Duke University for the R/V Cape Hatteras until it was discontinued a few years ago which is when they put her in the marine tech pool (which means she gets to go on any UNOLS ship that is looking for an extra marine tech).  Between the two of them, they have a great deal of experience and I am excited to see how much I can learn from them!

                The next day was quite eventful.  Before I said my farewells to the science team, we had a very special visitor come to tour our ship.  A caravan of police cars fancy SUVs drove onto the dock and a number of large guards in sandals and lava-lavas escorted Tuilaepa Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi, prime minister of Samoa, over the gangway and onto the ship!  This is a man whose face appears on all of their currency and must be referred to as “his Highness” exploring our geeky way of life.  The stewards prepared a nice lunch for us and the co-PI, John Mickett, gave him a tour of the bridge, computer lab, main lab and back deck.  We ended the afternoon with presenting him some official R/V Thomas G. Thompson paraphernalia and some deep sea salt from the Samoan Passage.  The University of Washington had a banner day for outreach.

                After all the excitement, we had a handful of Glosten engineers come board to assess the condition of the ship for its upcoming midlife.  During the midlife, the ship will be in a dry dock and will undergo millions of dollars of renovations to help it last another 20 years on the water.  The engineers did everything from take suggestions from the crew to performing 3d scans of the entire engine room, bridge and all of the labs! 

                Patrick and Will (from Glosten) took me down into the depths of the ship where everything is made of rust and the breathability of the air is suspect.  It is pitch black and very hard to walk around, especially for taller guys like myself.  The reason we were there was to check out the transducers and do a 3d scan of the area.  On the bottom of the ship there is a multitude of piezoelectric acoustic transmitters and receivers; in other words: things attached to the bottom of the ship that make a pinging noise.  There is one pinger that pings at a frequency that will reflect off of little particles moving through the top 100 meters of water.  It then receives the reflection of the ping and determines how fast the current is moving via the Doppler effect; they call this the Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP). 

               There are several other types of pingers mounted to the hull that are more useful to a geologist, such as the EM302 which basically uses sound to snap a picture of an area of seafloor below the ship.  The ‘snapshot’ shows changes in elevation and allows you to display the basic bathymetry of the seafloor in three dimensions.  Another pinger is the Knudsen CHIRP sub bottom profiler which, unlike the EM302, it shows what is going on under the surface of the seafloor. 

               All of these pingers are either hard mounted or on a retractable stem.  The retractable stem allows you to bring the device inside the ship and then drain the seawater before opening a door and being able to work on it.   During the midlife, they might be adding or fixing some retractable stems to the transducer well, but nobody is certain about anything when it comes to the midlife refit.

                So after a few days of testing and tweaking things on the winch we finally saw New Caledonia!  We had some huge swells during the end of the transit to Noumea, and a few of them rolled us more than 30 degrees!  This is enough to knock a tall guy like me off of my feet unless I’m holding onto something.  It is also enough to slide all of our papers, coffee mugs, glass beakers and laptops off of our desks, and enough to roll a mini refrigerator across the room.  The end of these big swells left broken glass on the floor, chairs toppled over, papers and books strewn everywhere and electronics broken or misplaced.  When I walked into my usually clean cabin it looked like someone had ransacked it.  This taught me a valuable lesson about rogue waves that I will not soon forget.  From then on all of my equipment has been strapped down tight or is on a rubber mat.

                Cruising into Noumea, New Caledonia in the late morning was perhaps the most picturesque thing I’ve ever seen.  First we met the pilot boat so many miles away from port that you could barely see land on the horizon!  This is because the barrier reef off the coast of Noumea is the second largest barrier reef in the world!  Seeing huge waves crash on the edge of this underwater world, while land was still a shadow in the distance, was a surreal experience.  Then we saw tiny white sand islands all throughout the reef as we approached the big island with big buildings, resorts and some smaller mountains covered in trees.  This was much more upscale than Samoa with the big hotels, but nothing like Waikiki.  It was the goldilocks of Pacific Islands that I’ve seen so far.  As we entered the lagoon where the port was we saw helicopters taking people on tours over the mountainous forests, giant cruise ships filling up with passengers and sailboats as far as the eye could see.

                Once we docked we had to wait for customs to clear our ship and passengers before we could get off.  It took them all day to check off everything on their list, including having us put up rat guards on our mooring lines.  Meanwhile we were stuck on the ship with almost nothing to do.  So the third mate and I found a project for everyone to do that was fun and killed a lot of time.  The A-Frame on the stern of the ship needed to have a line strung through one of its blocks.  In layman’s terms that means we needed to get a rope through a hole that is 30 feet off the ground.  There is a ladder that we could’ve climbed up and then used a pole to put the rope through the block, but that’d be too easy.  So we made a monkey’s fist (a big ball of a knot) on the end of a rope and made it into a contest to see who could throw the monkey’s fist through the tiny hole in the block.  Fast forward four hours and we eventually got it through, and had attracted the entire crew to give it a try! (I was the one that threw it through).

                After the customs people left, we were able to start loading the equipment for the next cruise, MoorSPICE, with Janet Sprintall.  This is a cruise with moorings and ctd’s much like the last one with Matt Alford.  However, this science team is a worldwide collaboration with 2 French Mooring guys, 2 Californian Mooring guys, 4 French scientists, 1 Fijian scientist, 1 Papua New Guinean scientist, 1 German scientist and 2 Californian scientists.  Quite an eclectic group of people and there will be some slight language barriers, but I feel as though this group will teach me an awful lot about their cultures and new science!