Author: Aidan Lee

San Diego is here, and compared to the relative slowness and lull of the transit leading up to our arrival (we were out of packing boxes halfway through and couldn’t really get much offloading work done after that) I’m glad that things have started to pick up. We’ve been flitting around packing oceanographic instruments and Alvin hardware into shipping containers to be hauled off by the ship cranes.

On our way to port we spotted what I assume is a SpaceX rocket launching Starlink sattellites from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara. I’m pretty sure I heard the sonic boom go off as it was going into orbit. It was a neat coincidence that we were at the right place at the right time when this happened.

The captain and the chief mate let me pilot the ship for a little while which was a lot more difficult and nervewracking than I thought it would be. You can control the Z-drives that rotate the propellers 360 degrees from the ship’s bridge, and you have to manage your speed of rotation by angling them just right so that you can get to where you’re going. There’s a lot of things to keep track of, and even when you point the vessel in the right direction it’s easy for a large wave or swell to start pushing you slightly off course. Changing the rate of rotation isn’t super responsive either, so you have to be very careful not to turn too quickly and overshoot. I had fun though! It was an excellent experience.

In the San Diego port, there seems to be a navy dolphin training facility next to us, which is crazy because I genuinely thought they stopped training dolphins for military purposes after the Cold War. I assumed it was military dolphins anyway, considering the entire region south of us is a naval base and I literally saw dolphins hop around in these little sectioned-off areas in the facility. Insane.

After we fully docked, it was actually time to get to work for once. There was a lot of Alvin paraphernalia we had to haul on shore such as the two lead-acid batteries in the vehicle (as well as the one spare in our battery hold), various cargo containers full of cameras, scientific equipment, lights, metal frames and hardware, and more.

I did also get to explore San Diego a bit. The view from our dock is already pretty good, and the crew and I have gone into the neighboring towns and downtown districts a few times after work just to see what’s out there. It does take around 15 minutes by car to go downtown and we don’t have a lot of rental cars available, so going there is mostly reserved to special occasions or weekends. I can confirm Mexican food down here is as good as they say it is.

I don’t really have much more to say about our work since it is mostly just packing and shipping of various items until the finish line, but I’ll keep you all updated if anything of note occurs. Look forward to my final post (or penultimate post? It’s unclear).

Cheers!

Aidan

Astoria has come and gone to usher in a new era! We left on the 25th and we may actually be on track to arrive earlier than expected, so we’re slowing down our transit a little just so that we get into port on the 30th as established just to avoid the logistic issues.

Astoria is a pretty nice port town all in all (plus the security at the port was slightly buffed compared to Newport’s – they actually asked for identification cards this time). It’s got a cute trolley that rolls around occasionally, a delightful sparkling lemonade at the Columbia River Coffee Roaster near port, and truly beautiful beaches. I’m told that the weather wasn’t usually as nice as it was when we were out exploring the town, so I’m glad I got to explore it in its full glory.

When I say that the beaches (specifically Sunset Beach) are beautiful, I mean they’re REALLY good. This is genuinely the most optimal place I’ve seen to run on sand – barely any people, spans for miles (probably), no sharp objects to step on, stunning view, you name it. Wish I could have gone on a couple more jogs here!

There was also a whale carcass here too. It was a little odd that there were no decomposers or flies or seagulls or anything chipping away at it, but I just assumed that it was pretty old and that the scavengers got to the good parts already. We were kind of worried about the corpse exploding from buildups of gas during decomposition (there have been several reports of this event occurring) so I observed it from a distance. Despite being decently old, it still smelled horrendous, as expected.

They have wild rabbits at Cannon Beach. I don’t mean the brown ones that graze on lawns and stuff, these ones look like people literally released the local pet shop population upon the ecosystem. Somehow they seem to be thriving – do they not have any predators in this region?? I can tell that they’re wild by the way they react to humans but they also seem very used to the presence of people. Intriguing.

Most of my actual work on the ship during our transit has been packing things up and getting ready for moving out. We started running low on crates to put supplies in, so things have been getting a little stagnant recently. I’m trying to counteract this by keeping myself busy designing printed circuit boards and having them fabricated and sent to San Diego so I can pick them up when I get there. There’s a lot of talented electrical engineers on the Alvin team that I can request advice from, so I’m grateful for this opportunity to bother them about extremely trivial KiCAD questions. I also gained a newfound hatred for tariffs.

They gave a tour of the engine room today and showed us some of the tools and equipment they use to maintain smooth operations of the ship like power distribution and propulsion. It was very interesting and yet very loud. Also smelled like chemicals.

I didn’t expect to see so much wildlife on this stretch of the trip, but so far there have been a lot of sea lions, plus several whales! The whales have been frustratingly difficult to capture on camera, so you’ll just have to excuse the cryptid-like photo of this one. If you can figure out what species this is from this image alone, tell me in the blog comments or something. I’ll be very impressed.

I think I have one or two more blog posts left in me before the internship ends. Now that the end is so close in sight, the four weeks I spent out here didn’t feel so long. I’m a little sad that it’s ending so soon now but I’ve been having a lot of fun out here. See you guys in San Diego!

Aidan

We’re done with dives! Yesterday was the last Alvin dive of the cruise and we’re heading back to Astoria, Oregon to drop off the scientists before we go on our transit to San Diego for offloading. Most of the week has felt relatively routine by now – getting Alvin ready for dives in the morning, turning on various beacons and radio devices, cleaning camera lenses, refilling CO2 scrubbers, etc. so I’m going to be recapping some notable highlights. Hard to believe we’re already done with dives and switching to a new schedule right as I was getting the hang of things!

The variety of people on board the Atlantis has been pretty interesting to talk to. Since our professions and backgrounds are so different, it’s been fun to chat with scientists, maritime crew, and educators about their roles on and off the ship.

Every time Alvin returns from a dive with the bio box used for collecting organism samples, it’s always entertaining to see what fruits the depths have yielded for us that day. In this picture, they’re mostly tube worms with bacterial growths (the white fuzzy parts).

Some students from Arizonan schools have sent in decorated Styrofoam cups for the sub to bring down to the seafloor. Due to the extreme water pressure (more than 200atm at over 2000m of depth) that’s down there, the cups end up getting squashed into these cute Shrinky Dink-like crush cups. I made one for myself on Monday, and the result is in the pic below. I’m quite fond of it.

On the final dive, I got to ride on the small boat that retrieves the swimmers. It was a nice feeling to be out on the water on a smaller dinghy, and I got some new POVs of the dive procedure. All in all it was quite entertaining, and I feel like I got a better understanding of the diving process from all roles.

It’s not all work out here anyway – there’s also plenty we do to keep morale high during monotonous hours when work feels stressful. Once when the seas were calm and the sun was out, the galley moved out onto the front deck for lunch to grill burgers and hot dogs. I really wasn’t expecting something like this, so it was a nice change of pace to rewind with a soda and chat with the crew.

A silly picture of me in the sub helping pilots run end-of-cruise maintenance checks. Learning about all the procedures and failsafes built into the sub was very intriguing.

This evening, another pod of dolphins came to visit the bow of the ship again! There’s no way to really tell if they were from the same pod, but they were of the same species at least. It felt like there were a lot more than last time – I’m taking it as a sign of good luck and safe voyages seeing as they also greeted me when I came out to the ocean for the first time.

Offloading at Astoria and transit starts tomorrow, so that’s what my next update is going to be about. See you soon!

Aidan

It feels kind of odd to say that it’s only been two weeks since I left, but I found that being on a vessel tends to screw up your sense of time. I’m sure the other members of the crew agree with me.

We’ve had a total of five dives so far, and dredged up plenty of interesting things. The dives for yesterday and the day before were cancelled due to unfavorable weather conditions, but it went somewhat back to normal today so we got to have a pilot-in-training dive, albeit the deployment was later than usual.

There’s a wide variety of samples that we collect on this specific cruise – sometimes we take water samples of the hydrothermal vents using isobaric gas-tight samplers (IGTs) which help keep contents pressurized when the scientists are doing experiments on the nitrogen-cycling properties of the microbes in the water. Sometimes we also bring up freaky little creatures like tube worms and this scale worm in the picture below!

Depending on what kind of samples we want to collect, naturally we would have to change tools for the job. The basket in front of the HOV Alvin typically holds all the equipment needed to complete the dive objectives of the science team for a dive, and it is our duty as the maintainers and technicians of Alvin to swap these out as needed per dive.

As an intern, my daily routine usually consists of getting up early start helping the team with pre-dive checks – making sure that cameras are striped, calibrated and properly cleaned, ensuring parts on the HOV are secured, refilling CO2 scrubbers, etc. We roll Alvin out on the tracks leading to the A-Frame at the aft of the ship, where we attach stacks of ballasting weights to it and put the pilot and observers in before we send it into the water.

Once the HOV is in the water, swimmers on a smaller boat will go to it and do some last minute checkups like unhooking safety lines and verifying communications are good to go. The phone the swimmers use to talk to the passengers of the sub is actually not waterproof, so while they’re verifying comms they also have to be very careful not to get it wet. The design is kind of counterintuitive, but the fact that the phone does not need to be powered independently makes the drawbacks worth it. Still, it is pretty comedic to see the swimmers make their way back to the little boat raising what looks like an old landline phone above them the whole time.

After the sub goes down, we have someone in the top lab to monitor GPS position and to maintain communications with it every so often. Us interns usually take this time to clean up our messes from the morning of deployment, and then it’s time to muck around until we get the signal to get ready for retrieval.

During retrieval, we finish up with post-dive tasks like hosing down the sub to wash off the saltwater and securing him back in the hangar for safety and in case bad weather starts rocking the boat around. We usually get some sort of report from the pilot about equipment or components that didn’t work so well and may need to be fixed or replaced, and our evenings are pretty much occupied with post-dive and fixing up the sub for tomorrow’s dive.

Of course, if the weather conditions are unsafe for swimmers or pilots we may have to call off some of our dive days. The swells were pretty big yesterday and the day before that, and we used the time not diving to finish up any maintenance that we’ve been putting off – fixing of lasers, replacement of important wires to the propellers that route inside the sub, things like that.

I’m learning lots of things out here. I haven’t needed to do any of this in my daily work, but the crew and the Alvin team taught me a whole array of knot-tying techniques which I’m sure is going to come in handy someday…? During downtime I also try to see what the other departments are up to, like bothering the scientists in the lab to find out what they’re doing with the water samples we bring them, or pestering the bridge about navigation. It’s been lots of fun, but it’s also starting to feel like I already spent a month or two at sea. Time is not real on this vessel.

I’ll be back next week.

Aidan

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

Hi! My name is Aidan Lee, and I am one of the interns working with the electrical team of the HOV Alvin through Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on the R/V Atlantis in early September. I’ll be boarding in Newport, Oregon after meeting with the team in Portland, and I’m excited to get to meet everyone there! I graduated with my bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle, and joined a remotely operated vehicles robotics team competing in the MATE ROV Competition during my time as an undergraduate. I’m looking forward to seeing what ways my technical skills from developing ROVs can apply to the HOV Alvin at sea!

Below I’ve included a few pictures of me, some of which are during the 2025 MATE ROV Competition in Alpena, Michigan. I’ve got friends on the team who have previously been MATE interns who speak very highly of the program, so I want to make the most of my experience here.

I will be back with another update in approximately another week or so. See you guys then!

Aidan