Month: February 2020

Hello from Barbados! This past week has been a busy mix of finishing up the first transit, reaching Barbados, and preparing for the science on our upcoming cruise. Last Wednesday the 19^th, we started to see some islands popping up through the mist. Saba was particularly striking with it’s clearly volcanic peak rising straight up out of the water.

With the warmer water and islands nearby, we also started to see many more birds, like the brown booby below. They were flying along with the boat and catching flying fish as they popped up. Flying fish are another thing I have not seen before and it is amazing how far they are able to propel themselves out of the water.

We could have reached Barbados on Thursday evening, but did not have berthing in the port till Friday so we hung out nearby and went in early Friday morning. After yellow fever shots for all, we cleared customs. In port, we have been following a schedule of working during the day and then spending our time in the evening exploring Barbados. Many things are easier to do when the boat is still, so we worked on a number of items that had gone on to the to do list during the transit.

Our upcoming cruise has a few scientific aims, but the main one is examining carbon content in the sediment. Ideally we will be using the MC800 multicorer in order to collect mud samples, but in case we have trouble, we also have a Soutar box corer. Whereas the MC800 can push up to 8 core tubes into the bottom at one time, the Soutar only has one square tube. Because of this, it has more force pushing the single tube into the ground so if the sediment is too hard for the MC800, the Soutar may still be able to push through. In order to get it functional just in case, we fixed and lubricated the release system and examined some rusty areas. While we are in port, we still do not have great access to everything we could need, so we sometimes have to come up with creative solutions. In this case, the problem was that petroleum-based lubricants could mess up the carbon being measured in the samples. The solution: Crisco.

Working on the core tubes and reassembling the CTD     [Photos by Gabe Matthias]

While we’re on the move, there are always some water measurements being taken. We have a flow-through system for seawater and measure temperature, conductivity (for salinity), and fluorescence (for an idea of phytoplankton in the water). Only when we’re in port will we shut off these sensors. We took advantage of their being off to clean the fluorometers and remove a PAR sensor (which measures light) that is no longer needed.

The Port of Bridgetown, Barbados is very large and has rapid turnover. There’s been an average of about 3 cruise ships arriving in port each day. Besides that, we’ve gotten to see a beautiful tall ship as well as a German research vessel, the Maria S. Merian. The Merian was right behind us and we got the chance to take a tour and talk to some of her crew. Their ship dwarfs ours at 311 feet as compared to our 185. While we have similar equipment, it was amazing how much bigger, more complex, and more modern her equipment was. For some comparison, their winch cable has a working load of 4 to 5 times ours. She’s headed on to Punta Arenas and then Antarctica for research involving clouds.

The Maria S. Merian

We were supposed to depart port for the next cruise on Monday, but again we ended up with a delay in the schedule.  This time the reason was a failing bearing on one of the generators. Sleeves were made to fit around the shaft (which had lost a significant amount of material) as well as around the bearing and the installation was just finished. If all goes well, we will be leaving Barbados tomorrow morning at 9am and the next time I write it’ll be from out at sea.

We got the chance to go for plenty of evening swims and enjoy the beaches of Barbados. We even saw the silhouettes of a couple turtles once the sun went down.

Hi all! I can’t believe it has gone this quickly, but I have now been with the Endeavor for one full week. Last Monday, I met up with the R/V Endeavor at its homeport on Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. I’ve spent a lot of time on Narragansett Bay in various boats and at the GSO campus where my mother works and I have gotten to see the Endeavor arriving, leaving, and in various states of mobilization and demobilization, but it was very cool to go aboard for the first time and it’s a special ship for my first time at sea. 

On arrival, I got to meet Gabe, the marine tech aboard the Endeavor who will be serving as my mentor. He gave me a tour of the ship and then I spent the rest of the day helping with various things on the to-do list before departure. Tuesday was the official mobilization day when the science team brings their equipment aboard and for me this meant more helping to load the ship and making sure everything got properly secured. I also got to do some work setting up the CTD, which will be one of the primary instruments we use at sea. This is one of the main instruments, or really package of instruments, of oceanographic research and measures conductivity, temperature, and depth of the water. Ours is a bit more complex and also features 12 Niskin bottles which take samples of water at different depths, a fluorometer to measure chlorophyll which gives information about phytoplankton in the water, and an altimeter for better depth measurements among other instruments. 

Our departure was scheduled for Wednesday, but things did not quite line up to make that happen. The ship has two antennas for two different internet systems and on Tuesday night, one of them went down. It turned out that a small belt responsible for connecting a positioning servo had broken and unfortunately there were no spares. Two vendors were found and two boxes of these belts raced our way, arriving Thursday morning. Installation went well and we were off Thursday around 12:30.

The R/V Endeavor leaving port at GSO     [Photo by Celia Gelfman, my mom]

The port at GSO leaving the R/V Endeavor     [Photo by me]

While I have spent plenty of time on smaller boats and have been out in the ocean a few times, this is my first time at sea for an extended period and my first time on a research vessel. Perhaps the sea is testing me but shortly after leaving port, we reached large swells that had the ship pitching significantly. By the next morning, the pitching was gone but since then we have been experiencing fairly sharp rolling of up to 15 degrees each way (enough that soup is a scary thing and extra precautions have to be taken to prevent falling out of bed). While my sea legs are not quite there yet, I think I do look less ridiculous trying to walk around then I did at first. 

At the moment we are in transit to Barbados where our scientific cruise will begin next Monday the 24th. On this leg, there is only a small amount of science happening, so I have had plenty of time to work on projects. My main one has been building a rack for the core samples that we will be collecting on that cruise. This is a simple machining project, but it has given me a taste of just how difficult things can be in a moving reference frame. It consists of a plastic back plate and a bunch of plastic struts through which bolts and pins fit for the cores to be locked into. Really all it required was a lot of positionally accurate holes. With a mill or a drill press this would usually be an easy project, but as I had learned, supposedly easy things like walking are not very easy on a ship, and so slightly less easy things like using a drill press become significantly less easy. With a 15 degree or so roll going on, the vise that I put on the drill press table quickly decided that it preferred the floor. After that, I got much better with clamps, but with so much relative motion between me and the drill press, it was still very hard to line things up to clamp them down and even the actual drilling was not made easy with my leaning around to keep my balance. I have never thought of drill presses as so exciting before.

Though completed, the rack will look pretty boring until it’s all mounted, so instead a picture of the multicorer that it will be used with. I’m painting over areas that had significant corrosion that we sanded down     [Photo by Gabe Matthias]

Another project that I helped Gabe with was redoing the terminations to the cables on the winches that will hold the CTD. The cables have wires around the outside with an electrical cable at their core and this means that the place at which the electrical cable separates out while the cable is attached must have a special termination for proper strength and waterproofing. The basic procedure entails unwrapping the cable and bending each of the wires back. Molten arconium is then poured in to seal everything up.

Undoing the cable for the termination     [Photo by Gabe Matthias]

That’s most of what I’ve been up to this past week. I’ve had an amazing time meeting the crew, learning how the different pieces of scientific equipment work, working on projects, and learning about the things that are a little harder at sea. We will pass the Tropic of Cancer within a few hours and will be in Barbados probably next Friday. I’ll be writing here on a weekly or so basis, so keep checking in to hear about the cool things I’m up to next!

-Lydia

Hi all! My name is Lydia Sgouros and in just one, short week, I will be going aboard the R/V Endeavor for my first cruise as a MATE intern. I am from Rhode Island, currently attending Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where I am a senior in Mechanical Engineering. Last year, some classmates and I started up an ROV team and competed in the MATE International ROV Competition with our robot, the Wobbegong. I loved the unique engineering challenges of the undersea environment and I look forward to learning more about these challenges and the special technologies used to collect data from the depths of the ocean over the next six months.

The Wobbegong    [Photo by ROV Team Captain, Rhys Hamlet]

The Endeavor’s homeport is at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography.  In the next couple days, I will drive home, finish packing, and prepare to go aboard. I will be sailing with the Endeavor until April at which point I will head to Bermuda where I will sail with the R/V Atlantic Explorer out of the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences until mid-July. I will post a weekly blog here giving updates about my cool new experiences at sea.

Last year, on Lake Erie. Now to bigger seas!    [Photo by Kristina Collins]