Month: August 2019

This week the day shift went through A LOT of trouble shooting. It’s not a good thing but I was super excited because I got to learn a lot.

There are two shifts for the STARC people. Both shifts are 12 hours long. Amitav and Austin are on the night shift (midnight to noon), Kristin and I are on the day shift (noon to midnight) Daniel and Danyelle are the floaters, however Daniel was mainly the day shift with Kristin and I. The scientists were also on around the clock and had a split between day shifters and night shifters. The coast guard is ALSO on around the clock shifts. Because of this we are doing CTD’s all day every day.

First hour into the first shift: test run of the CTD and the Bongo nets. I helped one of the fish people (zooplankton scientists) put together the bongo nets and the fastcat on deck. The scientists are super excited like young children on Christmas eve.

One of the STARC members (Kristin) and I watched the CTD for its first decent into the deep (just a test). Noticed that the pump on the CTD was offset by -5.227 (out of water should read 0?). Kristin is emailing seabird to get the OK to recalibrate the offset before the first cast at 8pm. In addition to this incident, early this morning we noticed that the temperature sensor on the bow was WAY off. We got a spare ready and sent one of the STARC people, Daniel (Dan the Man) to climb up and switch it out. We watched the MET display while he climbed, everything seemed fine until the MET display started to show all the instruments on the bow INOP! somehow the rabbit fried and all the instruments hooked into the rabbit were no longer sending data. Poor Dan has to climb back up tomorrow in the freezing cold winds to figure out what the heck happened.

Second day into this and the pressure sensor is a no go. We removed the little spigot to check the oil and there was no oil… ooops. We changed out the fish with the back-up fish (the one I set up!). Got SUPER muddy. It was a race against the clock because we were closing in on the first station. We got it done in the nick of time and looked like super heroes.  

The pressure on the replacement fish is showing an inappropriate value as well. But it’s not as bad as the first fish. This issue was new to the STARC people as Seabird is usually perfect so it was a learn as you go type of operation. We got a few CTD casts in because, “(Ship) Time is money; money is power; power is pizza; pizza is knowledge”, then the gas group (Dr. Jess and her cool crew) had issues with water from one of the niskin bottles. They weren’t getting the same flow as they usually do. The first running theory was a jelly got stuck in one of the bottles and in the process let out some of the water. The working theory was someone accidently sampled twice or mis sampled (or was it sabotage? Dun dun dun!!!). Any who, we took a good looking at the niskin bottles in question and then ran two tests on the next two dry CTD cast (dry CTD cast means no water samples but we took 4 samples at the bottom of each cast to test the bottles). Everything checked out, no cracks or leaks and the flow rate was a flawless symphony. I have a video of the flow rate of the water coming out of the niskin nipples; Jess, may or may not have, held a photoshoot for Captain Aurora (Lego man she brings on all of her science cruises).

On the Daniel front (remember the wonky temperature gauge and the fried rabbit?). Daniel got to climbing but due to conditions did a quick secure of the instruments before he tackled the rabbit (circuit board) down under (bow of boat, main deck). I’m not completely sure on all the detail of his fine tuning but as far as I could tell and understand he disconnected the rabbit, tossed it aside and individually connected the wires to serial; basically, doing the same thing the rabbit was doing but with less collateral. In the morning he will be climbing again. In the midst all of this debauchery, Bob the God (Chief Scientist, Robert Pickart) was a little less than satisfied about the pressure data from the CTD. Since the pressure offset wasn’t linear, fixing the data after a cast to reflect proper pressure (also there isn’t anything else giving us a reference pressure) is very difficult if even possible (maybe it is but it seems crazy to me).

We need a working CTD asap! Luckily, we weren’t too far from Nome and had consistent communication with STARC personal on land so we were able to get a CTD flown out to Nome (Side note: the plane was delayed about 5 hours so the cruise is standing by to stand by). On the other hand, the coast guards had to get a part dropped because there was a leak in one of the engines (one of the casualties from the first transit). What I mean by “dropped”: a helicopter flies out to the middle of the ocean where the Big Healy is hanging out, then they throw the part out of the copter and into the big ocean. Healy has a small boat drive out to where they dropped the package and scoop it up. Then the small boat returns to the Healy and hoists the part up on deck.  

On a personal note: I was doing a deep squat to get some sensors out of a box in the main lab and ripped my pants like SpongeBob did in season 1. I only have two pairs of jeans with me so I had to patch the hole in my pants with duct tape. 

Every Tuesday and Thursday there is a science presentation in the conference lounge. Today I attended a presentation By Dr. Jess Cross from NOAA called “Mooring to Money”. She discussed her work with Ocean Acidification, Climate change and the effects of these on Alaskan communities. Jess did a brilliant job on this presentation and concluded with a quote that really stuck with me: “Climate Change not Climate Doom”.  The science presentations are really grate as they bring you back to the big picture and remind everyone why we are doing what we do. It’s easy to get lost in the details when immersed in work on the ship.

The rest of the day was a pretty low-key compared to the previous half of the week. I adjusted the Science Sea Water (SSW) and read up on the fluorometer and transmissometer.

The food is starting to get weird? We have moved from name brand chocolate chewy bars to generic brand oatmeal raisin chewy bars. Also, the movie channel stop working but at last we still have ice cream!

I took a selfie with the CTD after I gave it a bath (to prevent biofouling). The CTD is still my favorite instrument!

After a couple days exploring the beautiful island of Kodiak and transferring crew members and technicians, the Healy set off for Nome on Monday, July 29th. Our goal was to reach Kodiak on August 2nd, that Friday. For the most part, luckily, our transit cruise was uneventful. Apart from a few strange data acquisition readings which we cleared up, nothing major broke down or caused us trouble. Along the way, Roy, a former intern now working as a technician, taught us how to perform CTD wire terminations. I found the terminations to be tricky, and I spent a lot of time working on redoing mine. 

The termination is performed on the .322 EM (electro-mechanical) wire. There are two outer layers of wire which have to be un-layed to reveal three conducting wires inside insulation. You have to be careful when un-laying the wire and cutting away the insulation, because the wire must be re-layed and you can’t cut or damage the conducting wires. 

During the transit, I familiarized myself with the navigation displays. I uploaded all of the science party’s waypoints to each of the various navigational displays in the computer lab and the scientists’ work stations, then practiced uploading ice imagery. The Coast Guard purchases the imagery from a third party, which we then reproject and upload into the navigation systems. The reprojection step ensures that the imagery is properly overlayed onto whichever chart your software is using. Once overlayed onto our chart in the computer lab, we send the chart to the bridge’s computers using a remote terminal. 

As we approached Nome, we received weather reports of a major low pressure system moving in. On the morning of the 2nd, the anticipated science onload date, the Healy held position outside of Nome to assess the conditions. Because the crew transfer would be conducted with the Healy’s small boats, the weather made it too challenging and we were forced to turn back to ride out the storm. We traveled south again and crossed northwest over the top of St. Lawrence Island, then headed back for Nome two days later to try again on Sunday, August 4th. 

After finally loading the scientists on Sunday, we cruised towards the first of the DBO (distributed biological observation) lines planned for this cruise. Despite their extended stay in Nome and the lost time, the scientists were all happy to be underway and moved quickly to set up their labs. Unfortunately, however, one of the technicians noticed that both the original and the spare CTD were giving erroneous pressure readings above water. After some inspection it was determined that the units had come back from calibration with the manufacturer with large pressure value offsets, and so the data we had collected was possibly compromised, at least in terms of the pressure readings. 

Now, instead of moving to the second DBO line, we are moving back to Nome where the technicians have arranged another spare to be sent. We will load the spare via small boat and then continue the DBO line afterwards. Again, the scientists have taken the setbacks with good spirits, and even made the most of it. The chief scientist added some more stations to the second DBO line in order to map the currents in the region better. The goal with these new CTD stations is to get more data on the Alaska Coastal Current and the Bering Sea. In addition, the Coast Guard will be sending a C-130 cargo plane to airdrop some spare parts for the engineers. It will be pretty exciting to see a huge military cargo plane fly overhead and parachute some supplies into the water. 

Today I assembled the back-up CTD fish! I was super pumped to assemble all of the sensors on that thing. We probably won’t have to use it but it still made me happy.

The following day, I was still working on the CTD but just the wiring portion. After I finished with the wiring I used a software called seasave to create a new configuration file for the fish. Within the new file I had to import the configuration files for each of the instruments attached to the fish brain. Because we don’t have enough DO’s or another transmissometer, we use the configuration files from the instruments on the primary fish that is already attached to the rosette. After the config file was created and completed Marine Technician, Austin, assisted in helping check the voltage on the back up fish and made sure that the fish was talking to the deck box.

HA! The fish was talking to the deck box and everything seemed to exhibit the values we expected…. except there were no voltage values. So, we had to go through a long process to figure out what was going on and why it was happening by gutting all the nicely wrapped cables, swapping them around, testing resistance with the multimeter and more… it kind of hurt seeing the fish being disassembled. It hurt more when we finally found that the problem had a simple solution (reorienting one single cable). In hindsight it was pretty comical… my first taste of what it’s like being a marine tech I guess?

The arrival of the science party has been delayed two days due to weather. Our echo sounders are turned off and the only thing we are monitoring is the SSW. Long day due to the lack of projects so I read up on some of the science party’s SOPs. Movie night in the science lounge (all of the Matrix) accompanied by some ship rolls.

Next morning in the lab, it’s starting to get pretty cold. My fellow intern is starting to disappear in his hoodie. Right now, all you can see is his nose. We are still waiting out the weather and many people are still trying to get over their sea sickness. There was a page sent out to everyone directing them to the doc for some medications as a result, mess deck was pretty quiet during lunch. Can’t wait for science!! 

August 4th is the day the scientist make way for the ship! The Healy is too fat to pull into a Nome pier so the personnel exchange is primarily done through small boat opps. There was a slight delay because one of the boats stopped working… I think they are still trying to get small boat opps back to the ship, they’re kind of just spinning in circles. The first arrival of scientist was on a water taxi, which Roy (the last of our original tech group) used to depart to the island. Everything is busy and exciting. So many new faces and land energy! 

Later that night The Healy ran an abandon ship drill. Everyone has a job and a designated raft, my job was to gather blankets, Ami’s was to gather the food (since it’s a drill we didn’t actually have to haul a bunch of food and blankets out to the flight deck). After everyone huddled up with their raft family, they announced that the new Healy personnel had to try on the float suits, which are big and orange and swallow you whole. Feels like being hugged by a balloon.