Date: 3/25/2015
Time: 20:58
Location: Corvallis, Oregon
Quick introduction
Greetings to the few people that will probably glance over this blog post, my name is Sonia Brugger and I am the 2015 6-month MATE intern. A brief background about myself: I graduated from the University of Washington in June 2014 with a degree in Oceanography as well as Aquatic Fishery Sciences. I have spent time on the R/V Thompson, Barnes, and New Horizon as well as having had the pleasure of spending July-October of 2014 on the R/V Savannah for my short term MATE internship. Overall the majority of my past cruise experiences have been focused around biological and physical oceanography.
Log
It has been four days since I officially started my internship. The first two days consisted of checking into my housing as well as meeting the new hire for the OSU Marine Tech pool. On Sunday Rob (the new hire) and I drove down to Newport, OR where the R/V Oceanus is stationed to meet the crew and tour the ship.
Monday was my first day of actual work. Since the ship was leaving for a 4-day cruise starting Tuesday morning I spent a short portion of my day helping load gear, which consisted of a large amount of geological sampling instruments (grab sampler, gravity/piston corer, box corer). With the loading completed I learned how to terminate the .322 CTD wire and calibrated the tension sensor through load testing. There were also other small projects that I helped the other techs with such as installing sensors to the CTD package, putting up a bench in the wetlab for the science party, and troubleshooting the fluorometer. Overall it was a long day, around 14hours including the hour-long drive from our tech shop in Corvallis to the dock in Newport.
Today was relatively tame compared to Monday. Rob and I drove to Newport in the morning to bring over some paperwork and help the tech Johna with any last minute things before her cruise left. Overall there wasn’t much to finish up other then making sure the cables on the CTD package were ziptied and we didn’t leave any unnecessary gear on the ship. Afterwards we headed back to Corvallis to meet with the OOI (Ocean Observatories Initiative) group that would be sailing with us next week. We sat in a cruise plan meeting and got to check out all of their buoys/moorings. It was pretty exciting and yet rather unnerving to know that will be my first cruise as a marine technician on the R/V Oceanus. The OOI project is one of the biggest and probably could be considered as one of the most important projects currently going on in the oceanography community. The buoys that we will be deploying and retrieving are some of the largest ones built which makes them extremely difficult in a deck operation standpoint. As marine technicians for this project we will have to get one of our techs trained in the operation of a special heavy lifting winch that will be installed on the ship Saturday and is the only thing capable of working with the massive equipment. Overall it has been a thrilling start to my internship. I’ve already learned a lot of useful things and met some great people.