We were finally ready to put the ship back in the water. Everyone went around and checked everything on board. Then we were lowered back into the water. Pretty quickly we started to find some problems. I was called to the machine space which is on our lower compartment near the bow of the ship. One of the through hulls was leaking a bit of water. When I got to it I saw it was our science water intake. While we are under way on a trip we turn on a pump that pumps the sea water through different sensors and filters which measure temperature, selenity, the chemical makeup and the amount of CO2 in the water. This data is collected by a group of scientists at the end of each trip. The water can’t contact the metal of the through hull piping or it could contaminant the results. So this valve was specially fitted to have a piece of pvc pipe run through it. In case of an emergency and the valve needs to be closed the valve gate was sharpened and could cut through the pipe to seal everything off. Once this is done we need to wait till the ship can be pulled out of the water again and everything can be replaced. So it was this section of pipe that was letting a lot of water in. These valves had been taken apart and redone along with all the other valves on the ship as part of the inspection. I tried to tighten the part down but it was as tight as it would go. This part had not been replaced; it was an old plastic piece and that was part of the problem. Then it just broke all together under the straine. So now a lot of water was coming in. I had to close the valve but we had just put all this work into fixing and replacing the valve part so I didn’t want to just close it or we would not have that system until we had another dry dock. So I decided to work really quickly and take the fittings connected to the valve apart which would basically open the whole thing up and let the water just come rushing in. I was able to get to the pvc pipe and pull it out and close the valve without damaging anything. I managed to get it all closed up pretty quickly so we didn’t have too much water to pump out after, but I got pretty soaked. Now that I had everything out and the valve closed we could fix the section we needed to and nothing was damaged to where we would have to pull the ship back out of the water. I went back up to the main deck to let everyone know where we were at in that area, and to see how everything else was holding up. Unfortunately they found a small hole in the hull in the engine room. So we had to get pulled back out of the water anyway. We ended up needing to have a small section cut out and a new piece welded in. This pushed our launch date back another week.
