10/06 – 10/13

Week Four: Steaming Towards Dutch

We have just one more SODA mooring to put in the water and we also have to deploy one last WIMBO and a AMOS float at a secondary ice floe location along the way. We were stuck in an ice floe for approximately 6 hours, which was definitely the longest we had been stuck throughout the duration of the ice cluster stations.

We started science ops for the WIMBO and AMOS floats on October 7tharound 1000. They each went extremely fast. Usually I had been out on the ice the majority of the time to help with the ITP, but for these deployments I just went out during the end to help finalize each deployment. In total, they took about three hours to deploy. After deployments were completed we took a group science photo in front of the bow.

After the deployments commenced we transited south to find a SODA C location. While we transited, Tony, Brett and I were working on the pumps, valves, and piping of the science seawater system down in the motor room. This was a project they had been working on for quite some time and we finally got it done. There are two forms of naming for each valve and the engineering department only had some best guesses as to matching the forms of naming. I sorted everything out and then relabeled every valve with both forms. I also taped each pipe line with orange, purple, or green electrical tape to signify which line was used for what (primary deicing, secondary deicing, uncontaminated science seawater). We ended up deploying SODA C successfully and then having to recover a navigational mooring and redeploy that. Overall we took a few more days to complete this all, but were still on track to pull into Dutch Harbor early on the 18thof October.

The science party had some glider problems and we spent an extra day or two recovering and then redeploying and then recovering some more in order to get them to communicate correctly with the navigational moorings.

More awesome nature news, we saw three polar bears swimming about 50 miles from ice edge and another 300 miles from solid land. It was absolutely amazing and you could hear them all barking as they got closer to the ship. Definitely the coolest experience I saw during the trip. 

-Nick