Month: September 2019

After a car ride, a train, a bus, two planes, and a taxi, I have finally arrived in Bermuda aboard the R/V Atlantic Explorer to begin my time as a Marine Technician Intern! 

Over the past few weeks, I slowly prepared for the trip, picking up waterproof clothing and boots, and deciding which things to leave behind. I also enjoyed an awesome group of friends for the last few times as summer in Seattle came to an end (see image below). After a very busy few months working at NOAA, and enjoying the Pacific Northwest outdoors, it was hard to say goodbye.

The weeks leading up to my departure went by too fast, but I feel prepared to leave for the first cruise this upcoming Saturday. I am well stocked in Bonine and Dramamine, and have the rest of the week to get familiar with the ship. Overall, I am looking forward to a great experience! 

Next week, I will check back in with the cruise schedule, and projects I have been up to around the ship!

The sun sets over Lake Washington during my last night with two of my closest friends in Seattle, Henry and Noah.

This week is my last full week of my internship. The beginning of the week started with testing the altimeter. We have had issues lately with our altimeter not working correctly and although it gives us an accurate reading of how close we are to the bottom, as we get close to the bottom sometimes it would jump all around with numbers. We were lucky to get a spare from Seabird in the meantime so we could send them our altimeter to be fixed. We performed tests on the spare just to double check the spare since we are leaving on Wednesday for a cruise. On Tuesday we were lucky that our other altimeter that was at Seabird for repair was sent back to us. After performing tests on this one we were able to install it on our CTD and it was working great. Now we have a working altimeter, a spare in case we need it, and our other one sent off to be looked at. We left on Wednesday for a Hydrostation cruise. This cruise was only until Thursday evening. We conducted CTD profiles at the Hydrostation, different spatial station, and at the BATS location. We also collected water samples at these locations. This is my last cruise which is definitely bittersweet because I have enjoyed so much working and learning aboard the RVAE. We arrived to Penno’s Wharf on Thursday afternoon and we were offloading one of the UNOLS shared lab vans there because our crane is not suited to lift the van off of the vessel. A crane met us at the dock and put it aboard a truck so then they drove it to BIOS where is will be onshore until November. We had to wait at Penno’s Wharf for a few hours before going back to BIOS becasue of the tide. The day on Friday was spent working on projects on the boat such as doing tests on our JLR212 GPS and properly labeling the wires. We also were working on the phones that are onboard the ship. Some of the phones are not working properly and the phone in the tech lab was not connected and needed a RJ11 termination. After doing some tests to ensure we had the right wires figured out to make the termination we were able to make the RJ11 termination and the phone began to work again. It is a lot of fun to do electrical work throughout the ship and to better my skills with electronics. This weekend is a three day weekend for us because it is Labor Day. I am heading out on Thursday September 5th and I am certainly sad to leave this place.