Brief update since my Shakedown cruise on the Healy.
– Successfully completed the full inventory on all of the Triaxus boxes that OSU received from Moss Landing. Meaning that I will be able to start work on the rebuild during my next period of shore leave. Still not 100% sure where to even start on this project since we appear to have a lot of spare and broken parts. As well as the fact the Triaxus was supposedly customized by the Applied Physics Lab at the University of Washington….and the documentation is missing. It’s almost like buying a puzzle at the Goodwill and discovering you are missing the crucial boarder pieces. Luckily I still have the original MacArtney documentation as well as access to some great resources if I need to ask questions.
-Mooring deployment cruise. Completed a week long mooring deployment cruise for a Naval research group. Their custom “Quadpods” and ADCP/Temperature moorings will be used to monitor sediment transport along the seabed. Overall the cruise went well, we finished all the deployments in two days.
-Coring cruise. As of 0800 this morning we shipped out of San Francisco to begin a sediment coring cruise with a private research group based out of Washington. This seems like it will be an interesting cruise, albeit a lot of work due to the 24hr ops. Since the Oceanus only runs one technician generally, true 24 hr ops are not really possibly. However for this cruise one of the science technicians will spilt a 12hr shift with our marine technician (noon-midnight, midnight-noon) and I will be running from 6am-6pm in order to maintain clear communications between our science party and crew.