Marine Technical Internship Blog

 It is funny on how many countdowns there are going on aboard the vessel. 8 Days until we arrive back in Dutch Harbor, 14 days until we arrive in Juneau, and 20 days until the ship arrives back in Seattle [15 days until I arrive back home in New England]. I can’t forget to mention it’s # days and a wake up.
We did get a nice change of pace this week switching from CTD casts to XCTDs, at least for a day and a half. Instead of an evolution involving several deckhands, deploying a large cylinder with several pipes (niskin bottles) designed to capture water at different depths, along with an ADCP (acoustic doppler current profiler- which measures how fast water is moving across an entire water column) and a few other pieces of oceanographic equipment, we are able to test for CTD (conductivity, temperature, and depth), turbidity (clarity), and get nutrient, chemical, and salinity measurements from the water samples. So the XCTD saves a lot of time when trying to get a snapshot of an area, since it involves only three people, dropping a single probe down into the water column. It records conductivity, temperature, and pressure. So when deploying the XCTDs we stumbled across some really exciting data. We were capturing the formation of winter water and how it spreads across the Beaufort slope! So we went back to CTD casts for a “higher resolution” of this phenomenon. 

Photo Credit: MST2 Cory Padron
We did our deep CTD cast this week. This is always everyone’s favorite event, getting to decorate and shrink Styrofoam cups! The cups started at 9 cm tall and shrunk to about 3.75 cm. They were sent down to just over a mile (1.1 miles) below the surface to 1784m (5853 feet)! I got carried away making three different cups.

I also got to work on splicing cables. It’s been awhile since I did soldering, so it was a nice to get down and dirty and do some precision work with my hands. I also re-terminated some CAT5 cables; this was a first for me. The wires are organized inside the cable white and color with solid color (ex. WO/O, WB/B, WG/G, and WBr/Br). Somewhere along the lines, someone inventing the terminal end thought that it would be a good idea to switch two of the white/color cables in the terminal end (WO/O, WG/B, WB/G, WBr/Br). Tell me how that makes sense?! I ended up having to splice the cable ends twice, because of that mix up. Now I will remember the order every time I terminate CAT5 cables, and to check and double check the guide, instead of looking at the black and white picture for reference.

On our trek back west, coming in close to land, we also came back into cell phone service off the coast of Alaska’s North Slope. It is funny when your phone hits 3g and notifications come streaming in, two plus weeks worth. I guess a lot of people didn’t listen to my voicemail saying I was out to sea for six weeks, or all the away messages I put up on my email and social media. [Verizon, I use to have service in Dutch Harbor 12 years ago, and now I do not, but I do have service off shore the coast of the North Slope?!? Thank you!] 
After three weeks, we finally had an amazing Aurora sighting! The irony is the forecast said it was a low probability (2 out of 10). The past couple of days we have entered our “W” transect. We call it that because it’s the shape of a W, so we have had a pretty solid CTD cast routine, with time between casts ranging between 15 to 30 minutes apart. It also was extremely cold this week with wind chill temperatures hitting below zero, so my morning routine heading to watch has been walk down to the mess deck, get some hot water for my tea, and head back to the lab through the interior of the ship. After I get bundled up in my foulies, I head outside in the darkness to stare at the sky in hopes to see the Aurora, or the ice illuminated around the ship until the start of my watch at 6 am. Yesterday was warm, in the mid twenties, similar was predicted for today, and something just made me want to go “walk to work outside”. So happy that I did, because as soon as my feet hit the deck, I looked up to see the dancing green stream across the sky! Some call it luck, some call it fate, either way I was so excited!
We are also up to 8 polar bear sightings! We still haven’t seen any walrus’ or whales, hopefully soon now that we are near the ice edge. 

Living aboard a ship is nothing new to me, being a Coast Guard Veteran, having steamed around the Antarctic Peninsula and Scotia Arc with the Geological Society of America, sailed around New Zealand, with SEA Semester’s Global Ocean Program, I even have served as expedition staff aboard a Russian Nuclear Ice Breaker to the Geographic North Pole.  As a licensed captain, having worked on charters, boat deliveries, and even fishing, diving, and service support vessels, I have put on many miles at sea (almost four years documented sea time last time I checked). I have spent time out on the Okeanos Explorer as a mapping watch stander with the Explorer-in-Training program out in the Western Pacific before, but the experience of living and working aboard a research vessel always feels new to me. Having a “9-5 schedule” let alone while at sea, is completely the opposite of what I am use to. From working several seasonal jobs and employment contracts, my land schedule is always changing day to day. While at sea, I am use to rotating watch schedules, on top of a daily work schedule. Serving as a captain of vessel you are always on call, but here I worked every day from 0600 to1800 (6am to 6pm) ships time. Meals are always served at the same time. The daily duties change, but the repetition does not. The closest thing to standard routine I am use to is when my animals (puppy, dog, cat, and parrot) wake me up each morning. It’s a nice change of pace (aside from missing my fur balls). When your schedule is predictable, you can get a lot more accomplished when you are smart with your time, so I am quickly knocking out tasks (such as updating SOPs and work manuals) and working on new projects to keep busy.
If you haven’t been following, I am serving my internship with STARC (Ship-based Technical Support in the Arctic) as a Tech Watch stander, and WHOI (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute) is our science team aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Healy, a polar icebreaker. The primary focus of our work is moorings and CTD casts. CTD stands for conductivity, temperature, and depth (pressure) of seawater. To paint a picture, we are around 72° North, in the Arctic Ocean. Our current area is off Prudhoe Bay, North Slope in Alaska, in November. So ice is forming all around us, day is turning to night, and temperatures are dropping. Right now we have about 5 hours of daylight. Sun rises at lunch and sets at dinner. We are limited to recovering and deploying moorings during daylight hours (obvious safety reasons), so that does put some restrictions on our CTD cast transects (we have to sometimes break away to go recover a mooring).

The portable heater in our CTD compartment is broken, and so is the back up. The space is still heated, but pulling equipment out from the water, even just a minute, below freezing temperatures with wet equipment, is not good. We have been getting around the lack of heat by flushing the pumps with room temperature salt water, then slowly adding warmer saltwater, to bring them up from below freezing every time the CTD cast comes back aboard, so it is ready for redeployment. We also use a heat gun (much like a hair dryer) on some of the equipment parts to unfreeze them, being extremely careful, not to damage any of the sensors. Our saltwater flow system on the ship was even getting clogged with ice chunks. We’ve been busy.

Photo Credit: Brandon D’Andrea
Still nothing is better than stepping outside, in the clean, crisp, Arctic Air and watching jaw-dropping icescapes. We have been lucky enough to catch a glimpse of an Arctic fox out on the ice, ring seals sunning, and even a polar bear mother with her two [one year old] cubs, not to mention seabirds. We also got a glimpse of the Aurora, peeking between the clouds one night. We are entering a high-pressure system, and with a waning moon, it will give us more optimal conditions for viewing, fingers crossed! The sunset on Halloween blessed us with a sight of perihelia sun arcs! Also known as sundogs and ice halos. Think of a rainbow, but the arcs are reversed. When you see sundogs, it’s a sailor’s weather prediction that snow is coming, and lo and behold, it started to snow an hour later. 
We are continuing to push east, as far as the ice allows us. Stay warm!

The flights to Dutch Harbor are always a hit or miss, but with 4 legs of flights, the flight to Dutch was the only flight NOT delayed. The previously flight delays, just happened to cause me to miss that flight, luckily there was a flight later in the day. It feels good to be back in Alaska. I cannot believe how much has changed over the past 12 years.

It is funny, after previously serving in the Coast Guard, you forget how small of a world it really is. Upon arriving I immediately ran into the Commanding Officer of the Healy, whom happened to be my previous CO when I served on the USCGC Hickory as a non-rate. I also ran into my old roommate from TranCen Petaluma and another whom was my A-School instructor. It’s a large ship, with about 120 souls on board, so I can only imagine whom else I might run into.
After a good nights sleep, I hopped right in, learning the ship and where everything was, and what my duties and responsibilities would be. I am working with STARC (Ship-based Technical Support in the Arctic) as a Tech watch stander, and WHOI (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute) is our science team aboard the Coast Guard Polar Ice Breaker Healy. We will be doing mooring work on the continental shelf of the Alaska Beaufort Sea, along with CTD work spanning the Chukchi and Canadian Beaufort Sea.
Immediately getting to work I got to fabricate a bracket to hold an instrument, the scientist wanted to add to the CTD. Loving puzzles, I got quickly figured out how we would attach the instrument close enough to their other sensor, but far enough to not cause interference.  
Photo Credit: Matt Hirsch
The other issue was creating a structure strong enough where it would not cause vibrations. A saw, dremel, and some scrap metal did the job! We are deploying two test casts later today, fingers crossed the fabrication works out.

Once getting underway we booted up all the systems that would be running over the course of our voyage such as the multibeam, knudsen echo sounder, EM122, ADCP, Hypack, QINSy, seawater flow through, pCO₂, along with calibrating the instruments. Setting up, double, and triple checking the data flow, serial servers, and syncing the systems to ensure all the data is collected and it is being filed in an organized manor.
Upon departing we had a good test to make sure all of our gear was secured for sea, heading straight into 6-8m seas. It looks like there is a high-pressure system on the horizon, so it’s forecasted to have smooth sailing as we go through the Bering Straight this weekend.

10/13/18 – 10/22/18

Week Five: Inport Dutch Harbor

This week we spent the majority of our time steaming back through the Bering Strait and Bering Sea. We saw the Diomede islands in daylight this time, which was amazing. The Big Diomede is Russia and the Little Diomede is the United States. We could also see mainland Alaska as we passed through the strait. Weather had been predicted to be a little sporty as we went through the Bering, but ended not being all that bad. We still had a couple loose ends to take care of for NOAA in two mooring recoveries south of St. Lawrence Island. The first mooring had conditions outside parameters to deploy a small boat, so the captain and chiefs decided they would release the mooring and pick it with a grapple and the aft a-frame. This proved to be really challenging as it was the first time in a very long time the Healy had done something like this. While this is standard on some UNOLS ships, the Healy is far larger and doesn’t have the manuverability that those ships have. It was an exciting recovery and you could really feel the whole crew getting into it. The conditions were challenging and the recovering was challenging and thus made the success all that much better. We ended passing the second mooring due to conditions not being favorable and that would conclude our full science operations. We were now on our way to pull into port in Dutch Harbor. 

I spent my time on the bridge while we made our way into Dutch Harbor and to the pier. It was a cool site to see everyone up there anxious to finally pull in after 37 days underway. We pulled in around 1400 on October 18th. 

The rest of the time spent in Dutch Harbor before I departed was spent doing some routine mantainence on our systems and improving some science seawater capabilities. 

My time has come to an end on the Healy and with the crew of STARC. I enjoyed every minute of my internship aboard and had some unreal experiences and opportunities that do not come very often. Thank you for taking the time to read my blog and I hope you enjoyed hearing about our adventures in the realm of the Arctic Circle. 

-Nick

10/06 – 10/13

Week Four: Steaming Towards Dutch

We have just one more SODA mooring to put in the water and we also have to deploy one last WIMBO and a AMOS float at a secondary ice floe location along the way. We were stuck in an ice floe for approximately 6 hours, which was definitely the longest we had been stuck throughout the duration of the ice cluster stations.

We started science ops for the WIMBO and AMOS floats on October 7^tharound 1000. They each went extremely fast. Usually I had been out on the ice the majority of the time to help with the ITP, but for these deployments I just went out during the end to help finalize each deployment. In total, they took about three hours to deploy. After deployments were completed we took a group science photo in front of the bow.

After the deployments commenced we transited south to find a SODA C location. While we transited, Tony, Brett and I were working on the pumps, valves, and piping of the science seawater system down in the motor room. This was a project they had been working on for quite some time and we finally got it done. There are two forms of naming for each valve and the engineering department only had some best guesses as to matching the forms of naming. I sorted everything out and then relabeled every valve with both forms. I also taped each pipe line with orange, purple, or green electrical tape to signify which line was used for what (primary deicing, secondary deicing, uncontaminated science seawater). We ended up deploying SODA C successfully and then having to recover a navigational mooring and redeploy that. Overall we took a few more days to complete this all, but were still on track to pull into Dutch Harbor early on the 18^thof October.

The science party had some glider problems and we spent an extra day or two recovering and then redeploying and then recovering some more in order to get them to communicate correctly with the navigational moorings.

More awesome nature news, we saw three polar bears swimming about 50 miles from ice edge and another 300 miles from solid land. It was absolutely amazing and you could hear them all barking as they got closer to the ship. Definitely the coolest experience I saw during the trip. 

-Nick

10 days before I depart up to Alaska to meet the USCGC Healy! 

It is funny talking about Alaska to people in general conversation. I use to be stationed there with the US Coast Guard aboard the USCGC Hickory in Homer for a year, back in 2006-2007. When I lived there, I would always get the craziest questions like “Do you live in an igloo?, Do you have a pet penguin? and even Do people ride moose to work?”,  so when I mention that I am meeting the ship in Dutch Harbor, everyone always tells “stories” of what they “know” (mostly from the Deadliest Catch), not realizing that I have actually been there before. I am more than ecstatic to go back. This will be my 4th time heading above the Arctic Circle, while participating on this cruise, but I have never been there this late in the season, so I am excited to see the differences from 12 years ago, and compare to my recent time in the High Arctic in Canada, Greenland, and Russia.

With the day light hours dwindling, temperatures dropping, and the Northern Lights beginning their dance high above, I am looking forward to working with the STARC program. Polar and deep-sea exploration has always been my passion, since there is so much we can learn from our oceans, a database can be created of information needed to better understand global change, filling gaps in the unknown to convey reliable and honest science that is foundational to providing prescience about the future. From rapidly receding glaciers and ice caps, to plastics being found everywhere, to oceans chemistry changing, there is a lot we need to still learn, to better help us prepare for the future.

With participation with the internship, I am also fortunate it enough to get to attend the RVTECH and INMARTECH conferences next week in Woods Hole. Luckily it is a short 45-minute drive from my residence! Looking forward to meeting everyone. I am so grateful for the opportunities this internship has already provided for continuing my education, training, and support, and I haven’t even left yet!

Time to start packing!