The storm passed without much intensity. Just some wind and rain. We left Woods Hole to cooler, clearer, beautiful weather and headed out to Georges Bank through Vineyard Sound and Nantucket Sound. On the way we had an abandon ship drill, passed one of the cape wind test towers, and saw a big colony of seals on Monomoy Point. We deployed the habcam and zigzagged with it for a couple of days. There has been a lot of wildlife already- both on the bottom and at the surface. The habcam was recording lots of scallops, sand dollars, sea stars, and hake with occasional skates, lobsters, and goosefish. On the surface we saw schools of small fish being chased by tuna, pods of dolphins riding our bow wave, and several whales. There were numerous petrels and shearwaters gliding over the surface and picking plankton out of our wake.
Within the first couple of days, seas began building and were forecast to continue increasing. Soon we had 10-15 foot swells, made more dramatic by intermittent failures of our hydraulic stabilization fins. The boat was rolling pretty hard at times. To be honest I kind of enjoyed the waves. In addition to the stabilizer problems we had a few strange, sporadic, hard-to-diagnose communications issues with our winch data network and our CTD. Troubleshooting these systems kept us techs and the engineers well occupied. As a whole, the important stuff has been working fairly well.
I learned to pilot the habcam, which is a little tricky but overwhelmingly cool. The pilot carefully watches incoming images, a sidescan display, and the depth/altimeter readings while using a winch control joystick to pay out or reel in cable. Ideally the camera sled flies two meters over the bottom. Keeping it there is easy when seas are calm and the seafloor is flat, but underwater dunes and a pitching boat complicate things.
Dredging takes a lot of hard work out on deck. Working the dredge and sorting the catch is fun and good exercise, but tiring when we have a lot of back-to-back tows. The habcam is less work-intensive- for better or worse. Once in the water, the scientists control it from the dry lab and there isn’t much to do other than help fly it and annotate images. I do my daily sensor logs and maintenance, work on small projects or problems, clean the ship, help with whatever I can, and talk to the scientists in the lab and crew on the bridge. Until something goes wrong.
At one point we were on the bridge when a radio call came through from the lab saying that they lost all control to the habcam winch. The captain already had the ship at at full thrust so there was nothing the scientists could do but watch their picture feed and cringe as their million-dollar instrument plowed along the bottom. Ted, Casey (an engineer) and I ran down from the bridge, through the engine room, and to the winch room where we reset the winch controls and hydraulic power unit. Science raised the habcam to inspect it- luckily there was no serious damage.
We had a few more days of heavy seas and a whole lot of dredging. The variation in our dredge contents are amazing. It’s almost always a different mix, even between nearby stations. Sometimes it’s all scallops and fish, sometimes the dredge is filled entirely with sand dollars. It was cool to see all the life down there and I wished I had more time to study everything we caught.
Eventually the waves calmed down to the point that the sea became glassy. I don’t know if it was the calm water making things easy to see or some situation with currents, upwelling, nutrients and temperature- but one day we saw dozens of blue sharks, breaching and feeding whales, jumping tuna, schools of smaller fish, and enormous basking sharks leaping fully out of the water.
After a week and a half we began to work our way back towards Woods Hole to restock and change out scientists again. Ted, Max, and I disassembled part of the CTD carrousel and swapped out the sensors. This is done periodically so they can be sent in for maintenance and calibration. We had a day in woods hole, loaded fuel, did the crew change, and bought so much food at the supermarket that their checkout computer crashed. Another MATE intern, Ali, is now on board as we set sail again.