My first week on the Healy has concluded and WHAT a week it was! I realize this post has an unusual title, however as you read on, it’s meaning will reveal itself.
Having only spoken to Brett Hembrough on the phone twice, I was a little nervous to meet everyone as I arrived in Dutch Harbor. However, the second I met everyone on the STARC team, I began to relax. All the outgoing and incoming techs had just wrapped up their daily meeting and took me out to dinner. It was so interesting to learn how each of them, with their varying levels of experience and expertise had found their ways into this career. Standing around a bonfire pit fashioned from an old crab pot was just the kind of meet and greet I enjoy. As a fan of the television show, Deadliest Catch, I also found no small amount of humor in it. After the bonfire, they showed me around the ship and the lab that would serve as home base throughout the cruise. We also managed to get in a little sight-seeing. The entire island is littered with bunkers, gun mounts and pill boxes still intact from WWII. Being a huge WWII buff, I was completely thrilled to explore them as well as, walk right up to some of the crab boats that are featured on Deadliest Catch!! The most powerful event of this day was a trip up into the mountainous area of Dutch. There, with my brand new friends, I was able to scatter some of my father’s ashes over this breath-taking view of the ocean. My dad was stationed in Alaska during the Korean War and forever commented on how it was one of his favorite places he had ever seen. It completely defies words what this meant. Simply put. It was an amazing day!
We then departed Dutch Harbor and set about prepping all the gear and instrumentation for the cruise. Activating the many systems that we use for data collection suddenly made the lab come alive. Starting the echosounder, ADCP, multi-beam sonar, the MET (which displays all pertinent navigational data and much more). We began the task of readying the lab. We had barely made the turn northward at Priest Rock when suddenly the ADCP went absolutely haywire!
ADCP stands for acoustic Doppler current profiler and it, for the layman, basically provides data for the currents up and down the water column. In other words if you had a tower made of water and each floor had a current, it would report data on the currents of each floor. It’s important for many reasons, however, as explained by tech Liz Ricci, our most exigent need was that it also works in concert with the multi-beam sonar, in respect to fine-tuning it. It aids the sonar by better focusing the pings. In other words, it works like the focus feature on a camera, making the sonar image far more accurate. So, its absence was a huge problem.
Though I knew what it was, I had never worked with an ADCP before but was so pleased when the first task was to check the fiber connections and boxes. You see, after several days of acronyms and terminology pretty much overwhelming me, they mentioned fiber optics!!! Finally!!! Something I know. So I dug right in, checking and cleaning ST connectors and checking the serial to fiber converter boxes. However, no matter what combination of swapping cables and power cycling and re-routing we tried, nothing seemed to eliminate the check sum errors that were printing on the display. It was one of those strange moments, where you walk into the room and everyone is staring at the display screen scratching their heads in puzzlement. Not wanting to be left out, I started scratching my head too. Just to fit in.
(if that joke didn’t play, I promise to fire my writers upon returning to Dutch!). It took several shifts (two days worth), with a new updated report at each shift change and all three techs plus myself to finally solve this mystery. At one point, so many different things had been tried at different times, by different technicians that we went to a white dry-erase marker board and just laid it out. When trouble-shooting, you begin with what actually IS working and whittle it down until you find the culprit. As it turned out, technician Mike Coons, during the midnight shift, took a guess that although the fiber to serial converters were shown to work, perhaps that particular brand didn’t function well with the ADCP’s baud rate (rate of data transfer) so he swapped them out with another brand. And VIOLA!!!! It worked and the Healy once again was sailing with a functioning ADCP. It was one of the finest examples of problem-solving and teamwork I’ve ever witnessed. These techs are rock stars. I’m going to learn so much!!
Now with that dilemma past, we settled in and I was assigned several projects: 1. Continue the improvement of the lanyards for the Niskin water sampling bottles and 2, Develop, rig, test and install a float switch overflow alarm on the sink for the ships Flo-Thru system. I was excited to do both. The previous intern had developed a great manual for the specs on the Niskin lanyards and I found it massively helpful. I began experimenting with them on extra Niskin bottles as time permitted.
Once on station, the Woods Hole Institute scientists began the recovery of several deep sea moorings that had been submerged as deep as 4000 meters for an entire year. These are terribly impressive feats of science. They sent a single acoustic ping signal down to a release and a buoy appeared within minutes. The buoy was recovered by the coastguard in a zodiac small boat and winched aboard. This is a slow process as these moorings are almost 2 miles in length and contain almost 50 hydrophones, current sensor packs and many other types of oceanographic equipment. An incredible amount of data to retrieve. It was truly a sight to see, watching them run that deck with amazing precision and care.
We also began the CTD casts, which I’ve been chomping at the bit to get started. In an attempt to become more familiar with what I discovered to be an extremely prevalent aspect of the marine tech field, I built a very small, inexpensive (by comparison) CTD my final semester at school. Since boarding Healy, I’ve been anticipating these operations with a great deal of excitement. Crawling all over the rosette, taping it up and checking the harness and bottles was the very thing I had been waiting for all summer. Now the time was here and the first casts went perfectly. Actually learning the software for it filled a hole in my experience that simply building one couldn’t do.
Now to the title of this post! It must be said, that the Arctic is a magical place. In our transit this far north, adding to the thrill of crossing the Arctic Circle for the first time, I observed a handful of events that were brand new to me. From passing a remote island with an eerie ghost town on it, to seeing the tail of a whale slap the water with a crack!! We also passed two islands, one belonging to the U.S. and the other to Russia!!! All this and a walrus in the same day! But it was that night that wrote the title to this post. That night shift, I stayed late working on lanyards when Croy Carlin (the tech on duty) told me the auroras were out. We went out onto the helo deck and what I saw in the sky was the most amazing display of light I can ever remember witnessing. Being from northern Michigan, I had seen auroras before but nowhere near as brilliant!! I just stood there completely speechless as clouds moved in and out, enhancing the effect. I then went down to the ships rail and noticed bio-luminescent diatoms glowing like little dancing spots along the side of the ship. Like a dancefloor with a disco ball spinning, these green spots swirled and the sky just flashed and flashed to the music of Healy’s whistling ventilation fans and ever-constant rumbling power plant. It painted this incredibly stunning, living portrait that froze time itself. Nature’s discotech.
