Week 1 is already over, and it still feels kind of surreal to be out here. There have been so many exciting things and interesting people that I’ve encountered that it’s difficult to recount them all in one post without boring everyone who reads this, so I’ll show the most important things.
I met up with the Alvin team after flying down to Portland from Seattle, where we drove down to Newport where the Atlantis was docked together as a group. When we got there, I got to take a quick tour of the premises. As someone who’s never been on a research vessel, the Atlantis felt pretty average from the outside but was way bigger on the inside – rooms and halls were pretty spacious to move around in. Onboard amenities were much more fleshed-out than I thought they would be (there was a punching bag in the science hold?!), and the galley cooks up meals way better than I ever did in my entire college career. Shoutout to the cooks who greet me by name every meal.
As for the HOV Alvin itself, it was also pretty big – maybe the size of a small whale or an orca perhaps. During our pre-cruise maintenance and housekeeping work I got to walk around the top of the sub and climb into the sphere where the pilot sits. Alvin recently got a refitting recently with an ergonomic seating area, and I have to say it was decently comfortable in there.
Most of my work on the sub has been checking in on little things like searching for air or water bubbles in the tubes of oil inside the HOV or draining said oil from junction boxes in the front so that we can wire scientific instruments to the electronics systems. I helped with loading provisions and stores to feed us during the cruise onto the ship and checked the windows on the sub for scratches or blemishes. The two most exciting events that I helped out with were replacing one of the fridge-sized lead acid batteries and distributing and stacking steel plates which will eventually be used for ballasting.
To access the batteries in the first place, we had to move Alvin forward in its hangar to operate a crane that would open the hatch in the floor that led to the room with the battery in it, which was process that took a little time to complete. The battery that was supposed to go into the Alvin didn’t come with a casing on it, so part of our duties during the pre-cruise was to get the casing off the old battery and slide it onto the new one – main issue being that the casing is basically filled with oil. One aspect of this job I learned very quickly was that literally everything is covered in oil since it helps mitigate the effects of pressure in the deep ocean, and that I should give up on the prospect of having any unstained clothes on this cruise.
The stacked steel plates are used for the sub used as ballast to control its buoyancy underwater, and it dives down or resurfaces by jettisoning some amount of these steel plates that we attach to it. As such, we had to prepare several stacks since every dive would have at least 3 stacks of plates weighing more than 300 pounds per stack. Picking up these rusty steel plates all morning was a decent workout for my forearms. I also got rust all over my clothes, but I brought all the clothes whose safety I didn’t care about so it was expected. It’s for that grimy mechanical engineer aesthetic anyway.
We left Newport yesterday on the 5th. Due to the size of the vessel the boat rocks pretty slowly, which is nice to fall asleep to but kind of annoying when you’re doing fine, detailed work with small instruments and tiny probes. It’s better than the smaller boats I’ve been on though. Seeing the vast expanse of water on every side of you with nothing to keep you company except the ship and the gray clouds overhead feels kind of surreal. Liminal, even.
I lied about that last part, actually. There were other things keeping us company – there was a massive pod of dolphins that swam up to the ship as it was traveling to our dive site, and they were just frolicking and being silly on either side of the ship and under the bow, racing the ship and jumping around. We guessed that they were Pacific white-sided dolphins based on their coloring and our location. Genuinely one of the most breathtaking experiences I’ve ever had.
I’ve been having a lot of fun the last few days, and I expect to have even more fun when we actually get around to Alvin dives tomorrow. It’s around 9pm when I post this, and I do have to wake up at 5am for deployment preparations, so I’m going to leave it at that for the time being. Will update next week.
Aidan