Category: MATE Blog Archive Page 79 of 89

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.

June 30th. The motor is finally fixed and ready. We went out for a sea trial at 10pm and everything worked perfectly. We finally got underway soon shortly afterwords. Two things struck me as soon as we started the generators and disembarked. First, the Sharp is extremely quiet (for a big ship) even when she’s not in “quiet mode”. Second, she can maneuver in pretty extreme ways. Sharp can rotate around a point, drive sideways away from the dock, and do anything in between.

The first leg of our cruise was a short trip from Delaware up to Woods Hole with a bunch of data collection along the way. Adjusting to the 5am-5pm watch schedule took a day or two, but I like the 12-on 12-off watch system. I began the first week learning how to run CTD deployments by talking to the crane operator on the radio and processing station data. I also learned how to do my daily checks of the ship’s sensor readings and maintance of the flowthrough system.

In addition, I work on deck when we deploy/retrieve the habcam or scallop dredge. The habcam is an incredible piece of technology and does its job very well. It can stay in the water for days at a time and is towed at a relatively high speed; covering a lot of ground without doing any damage to the seafloor. We’ve already seen a ton of interesting benthic creatures on the camera and picked up a few shipwrecks on the sidescan sonar. The sidescan also allows us to see tracks on the bottom left by trawlers and dredges. In some places, especially off Long Island, the entire seafloor is crosshatched with dredge scars.

When towing fast, the the habcam’s tensioned cable starts to vibrate hard. In an effort to mitigate this, I helped the scientists attach zipties and rubber fringe to the cable.

I learned to launch and retrieve the scallop dredge on deck with Ted. It’s fun physical work but getting the dredge safely retrieved, emptied, and ready for its next deployment takes a lot of coordinated steps. Two experienced people can get it done quickly and fluidly, but I’m still slowly getting the process down. Once the dredge is emptied onto the sorting table and secured I help the scientists sort out scallops, fish, crabs, and everything else we catch.

The food has been great, our first dinner at sea was steak with vegetables.

Everything on the ship is working flawlessly. But Apparently we can’t catch a break- as soon as we we put to sea a hurricane started building up off of Florida. It’s forecast to track up the Atlantic coast just like us. The captain decided to do as much science as we could then run up to Woods Hole a day early and wait out the storm at the WHOI dock. We had a nice little break at Woods Hole, watched the storm, changed out some of the science crew, and got underway again once the coast was clear.

    June 23/24
Lots of boat cleaning. Vacuumed, scrubbed, and organized. Max and I worked on making cardboard mockups of equipment that will go in one of the lab vans for another trip. Packing tape is the worst I rescued a terrapin that somehow got itself over the seawall was stranded in the hot parking lot.

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-rU32dKLAh8U/U7G6eleNyXI/AAAAAAAAJeg/Xet_6Tv5s94/s1200/_MG_0126.jpg A terrapin. 

    June 25
Still waiting for the replacement control board, it should be on it’s way from Italy. Since we know the motor itself works and we won’t have to re-open the deck, we finally mounted the ramp and sorting table for the scallop dredge.

    June 26/27/28/29
We found out that the part actually never shipped from Italy and it would be another few days. There was even a rumor that the part made it to America but was accidentally shipped back. It finally got here but it was stuck at the shipping place in PA over the weekend. So close but so far. Thats a few more lost days. 

A new plan has finally come together to get the trip going on this boat. Sounds like it’s not getting canceled. The scallop trip is critically important because NOAA can’t set regulations without good population data. Fishermen are very opposed to regulation based on old or extrapolated data, and rightfully so. Somehow NOAA and/or NSF made a deal with the next cruise (or just bumped them) and added about 11 days to this trip. Hopefully I’ll be able to stay on for those. If we ever get off this dock.  

Max and I got to go for a short ride on UDEL’s brand new R/V Joanne Daiber, a 46’ boat built for coastal research and ROV work. It’s very nice and had a bunch of ROV’s onboard. It was great to actually get on the water for a little while.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-btTUVuhdQEo/U7G6kNFZU8I/AAAAAAAAJe8/baFG5r2mtiI/s800/_MG_1392.jpg Finally offshore, temporarily.

I organized some shelves of wires and wrote up instructions for the next person who has to clean out the followthrough system.

    June 29
Woke up to lots of alarms going of on the bridge. Turns out we temporarily lost shore power and the equipment freaked out. The chief mate got everything back in order. Later we had a little problem with the air conditioning but got it fixed pretty fast.

The motor part should get here today and hopefully we’ll be out to sea tonight or tomorrow.

    June 30

The part got here! The engineers installed it but had some problems with the software. If everything works out we’ll be able to do our sea trial tonight. The situation seems to be getting better. The scientists are on their way back from woods hole. I really hope they don’t get turned around again- for their sake and everyone else’s. The engineers are working hard and things are looking good for a sea trial tonight.

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-Ky14OyRPBwM/U7G6k5GkgVI/AAAAAAAAJfU/X3L2JGuD_lE/s1200/_MG_3870.jpg Better than Christmas.

Something went wrong on the CTD crane and the cable got kinked. Ted, Max, and I had to re-terminate it. I cut apart the old seals and made a diagram of the wire connections. Re-terminating involves cutting the end off the cable, resplicing the wires, reattaching the cable to the connector, and resetting the connections in a waterproof potting compound. To mechanically attach the cable, the end is bunched into a “birdsnest” which is placed in side the metal connection fitting. A chunk of soft metal with a very low melting point is heated and poured in around the cable. When it cools it creates an extremely strong connection. I took some pictures of the process for the procedure manual.

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-v3nnp2ON_74/U7HWI0aUbMI/AAAAAAAAJhs/ECSsgA41svM/s800/_MG_3930.jpg Casting the cable end