*I appologize for any spelling errors. The keyboard seems to be acting up (lagging response time/seems to hate certian keys)…
As of right now I am in the middle of another NOAA National Marine Fisheries cruise. So far this cruisehas bee rather uneventful, with 0 Red Snapper presently caught. However it is real exciting to see the scientists from the last cruise as well as some new faces. Whilethis may be the current voyage I’m on I would like to focus on the unexpected events that unfolded before this cruise began.
As I metioned earlier,life always has a way of testing you. In this case my test came from a last minute cruise put together during the two weeks of dock duty that I had. Since it was the first time the crew has had so much dock time a few of them (including my Marine Technicin mentor) took some out of state vacations. The problem with this is that when a las minute cruise cam around I became the fill in Marine Technician on th R/V Savanah.
I must say that it was both a nerve wracking and thrilling experienceall at the same time. On the day of the cruise I fired up our flow through system, prepped the CTD, and turned on the ADCP and echosounder. I then spent time filling out the pre cruise log, noting which configuration files I was using, what our fleet broadband usage was, and what the goal of the cruise was.
Luckily this cruise was rather simple. We were heading out off the coast to collect water from the niskan bottles, do some zooplankton net tows, and deploy an ADCP mooring package (all stuff that I have done before). Yet of course things weren’t as simple as thy sounded. When we reached the first station everything decided to go wrong at once…
When turned on and put over the side we discovered that the CTD was unresponsive…luckily I had seen this happen before on a previous cruise but it was still a total adrenalin rush/deer in the headlights situation. The fix for this problem was to bring the CTD back on board and shut it off for about 30s before turning it back on again. Essentially the handlers putting the CTD over the side accidentally turned the switch on- off- and back on again which seems to confuse the software.
The next problem we discovered was that readings of the CTD water temp and salinity was different then the flow through SBE 21’s readings…and the chief scientist was using the flow through readings to choose his sample sites. Since the water temp/salinity was too high we needed to find another site. To fix this issue I had to turn off the flow through, put in the back up SBE 21 and then restart the system….luckily it worked great. (During this proccss I managed to crash the SCS system…)
The final problem I encountered was never solved…for some reason the echosounder readings in the bridge begin freaking out when ever the gyrocompass GPS starts acting up…I have to wait for the new GPS to be ordered before I can try and fix that issue…
Overall the trip went amazingly well after those first few hiccups. I can say for sure that I love being a MarineTech and want to continue in this field.