Month: April 2016

Hello all,

  Well I don’t actually have a whole lot else to report for now.  Still in transit to our destination work area so things are pretty slow.  We put the magnetometer out along the way but really it didn’t involve a whole lot.  It is a device about 4 feet long that looks like a torpedo.  It is long and slender with little fins on the tail end of it and a cable running out the front (picture of it added below…YAY!).  It is light enough for a person to carry it without using any of the cranes or winches or anything like that so it didn’t take much to put it into the water.  The ship slowed down, the magnetometer (Maggy) was dropped off the back deck into the water, a few hundred feet of cable was let out and secured to the deck, and the ship sped back up again.  Deployment over.  The idea is that the Maggy will be towed behind the vessel all the way to our destination and it will record magnetic variations in the seafloor beneath it.  It will be recovered right before we reach our work site.  Took just a few minutes to get it into the water though so not much else to say about it.

     A few days ago Steve completed a cable termination on the end of the large 681 cable that we have running through the A-frame and main winch now.  I hadn’t ever seen one done before and apparently it is a good skill to have so I’m glad I got a chance to watch.  Steve also prepared the fiber optic cable ends of the wire for use with some of the scientists’ equipment which is a relatively specialized skill that was great to watch.  It didn’t seem very complex but definitely tedious and delicate…especially on board a vessel moving through some moderately rough weather.  It took Steve the better part of 6 hours to finish.  I started out taking some pictures to document the process but eventually started to help hold things (mostly because the vessel was definitely giving us a ride!) so I didn’t end up with much to show add here.  Also while we are at sea it takes me about half an hour to upload a single picture so I will have to keep it to a minimum so a picture of the Maggy is all you get for today.

   Otherwise the last few days I have been sick so even less to report on than usual.  I have been drinking a lot of tea (ungh) and have my very own box of Kleenex that I carry around with me so I’m all set…just a little slower than usual…and maybe grumpier.  We are supposed to arrive at the work area sometime tonight or tomorrow morning so hopefully my next update will include more adventures.

Til then

Elizabeth

   Well things have finally moved along.  We are on the water headed out for our long long long cruise.  Apparently we have about 8-10 days of transit time before we get there which is both nice and kind of a bummer.  Nice because I love the way the ship moves when we are under way.  It is one of my favorite feelings and definitely the best way to fall asleep in my opinion.  The bummer part of it is that there isn’t very much happening during transit.  No deckwork because nothing is going into or coming out of the water.  Not very much system work because none of the systems are being used.  There was a little bit more going on yesterday (the day we left) because turning all of the systems ON has the potential for trouble but everything started up the way it was supposed mostly and any little hitches were figured out pretty quickly.  So here I am with 12 hours of shift ahead of me (make that 11 hours and 31 minutes) and really nothing to do.  Yikes.

   One thing I have been doing in my downtime here is doing a lot of reading about Linux.  For anyone that knows me I’m sure you can sense my excitement…sigh.  I am pretty unfamiliar with such things and most of the systems on board the ship are run through Linux so forward I go.  Surprisingly I don’t mind learning how to DO things in the system.  It is kind of fun even though I am bad at it but I can see the potential power available through it.  My difficulty is that it is a new language and I flounder around for a while before I can get things to work.  I can usually figure out what I want to do and which commands do it…but it takes me a while to figure out the right way to actually type in the command.  Order and format.  Geez.  At least one of the techs here set up a virtual system so I can flounder and flail to my hearts content without being able to screw anything up (thank you Trevor you are a GENIUS!!) and that has helped me practice using it (and be WAY more comfortable knowing I can’t destroy anything important).  But reading about it…oh my is that ever dull.  I manage to get little tibits of useful information here and there and I’m sure it will come in handy…eventually. 

More next time,

Elizabeth

Hello all,

  Well we are still here in Honolulu waiting for repairs to be completed.  We had to cut short our last cruise because the ship was having rudder issues so we turned around and came home.  It was an especially big bummer for the scientists because they had a crazy schedule filled with all sorts of things they were still hoping to get done and they had to abandon the plans:/ It sounds like everyone was able to get some amount of their own samples so no one walked away without SOMETHING but no one got everything they were hoping for either.  Like I said…bummer.  Unfortunately these sorts of things happen on ships.  You plan and plan and plan and everything is scheduled so carefully and then some random factor rears its ugly head and spoils the whole thing.  But alas…things are being worked on now.  

There was some major nail biting for a few days over whether or not we would be able to have everything fixed in time for our next big cruise but things seem to be going well.  To repair the rudder they needed to take the top off which would allow the bottom to move around and potentially get out of alignment (this is a relatively large oversimplification of the situation but I’m just trying to give you some context here).  One option for preventing that would be to dry dock.  That would get the vessel out of the water so that everything could be stabilized completely before any work was done.  Since we were looking for a much faster turnaround time the next option was to send down divers.  They went down and secured the rudder from the outside by doing some pretty cool underwater welding.  They were out here for a couple of days so I can’t imagine it was an easy fix but it seemed to do the trick.  Once everything was stabilized they were able to take apart the rudder and make the repairs it needed.  All said it seems like it has been a really big job and I SOOO wanted to watch the action but the guys have been working deep down in the ship and I know there is very little room so I would have been in the way but that would have been really fun to see!   

We were originally scheduled to leave on Tuesday for this long cruise and obviously missed that but the hope is Friday (tomorrow).  Still no final word yet but that seems to be the most recent gossip.  I really hope things pan out that way because this is supposed to be a 44 day long cruise and all of the scientists are here and the ship is loaded and everything.  Fingers crossed!

I will have more updates later today or tomorrow and expect a few more posts over the next day or two as I fully commit to trying to upload pictures.  Honest they are coming:)

Until next time,

Elizabeth