Originally the plan was I would be taking this cruise off and getting a little down time in my favorite city in the world Seattle Washington. But as luck would have it things went from okay to bad in a couple of days. I am still aboard the R/V Atlantis, which now feels more like home than anything. I am currently incharge of running a satellite van that is feeding the world live high definition streaming video and audio from the ship. So anytime you would like you can log on to http://explorationnow.org/atlantis/ and see what is going on in the main science lab or on the bottom of the ocean using JASON cams. Initially it was supposed to be just me realligning a satellite dish whenever the resolver could not reaquire the satellite, but as so few things go as planned my job has become much more involved. Today our first live day with me at the helm all the networks started crashing without me having changed a thing. Turns out we have a problem with the DHCP assigning portion of our router, which granted can be fixed easily enough on land, or with a few simple steps, but when you can’t disrupt what is going out to the world and people are watching you have to work around the problem quickly. So I had to do some back door networking tricks that before today I never knew even existed. I wish I could explain to you everything that I managed to do, but I was doing it in such a hurry that I don’t even remember each step I took to get it all running again.I would write more but my brain is completely drained of any thoughts that are cogent beyond “WHAT JUST HAPPENED?” But I have decently high speed internet going and the show went on without a hitch. WIN FOR INTERNS!!!! We really can fix problems and keep things going when put to the test. This was quite possibly the fasted 12 hour shift of this six month period, and it isn’t over until I can reset some routers and reassign some IP addresses to finish the fixes which will have to wait until around 11pm pst.
Category: MATE Blog Archive Page 85 of 89
Posts that were imported from the historical MATE blog at marinetech.org
R/V Marcus G. Langseth,
06-July-13, Home
R/V Marcus G. Langseth: Leaving the Boat
Hello everyone! This is my last blog post. Sadly, while the boat will continue its current cruise, I will not be joining them. The NSF has granted this cruise an extension and will not be returning to port before July 29th. I have other commitments that I need to fulfil and thus I will not be able to join the R/V Marcus G. Langseth when they venture back out to finish the cruise.
I had a good time on the Langseth, but like all things, it had to come to an end. Looking back on my cruise, I realized that I met some really wonderful people and I am going to miss all of them. I had friends, mentors, bosses, co-workers, and colleagues. I learned a great deal during my trip about life out in the real world, data collection, and maintenance and repair of a boat and seismic equipment. It was a wonderful adventure.
Although I am sad to be leaving I must admit I am a bit happy to be back on land. Being on the boat is a lot different from land. Beyond the fact that your whole world is about 230 by 60 feet, you also have to deal with the motion of the boat, the unimaginably slow internet, the prescribed meal times, and small population. While I will miss the crew of the Langseth, and the work I was doing on it, I won’t be missing the internet nor the 12 hour shifts. I wish I could be staying to finish the cruise. Good bye and good luck to you R/V Marcus G. Langseth and crew; may our paths cross again
This short two week cruise has been very interesting. I have spent the majority of the time working with the Kongsberg EM-122 Multibeam system doing sea floor mapping and using the new water column data gathering portion of this system to track methane hydrate bubble plumes. I have learned to use a new type of satellite system that allows for 10Mb out and 512K inbound data streams. This system is monsterously faster than the current used HISEASNET systems that a majority of oceanographic vessels are equipted with.
The past few days have been rather rough seas, sometimes upwards of 20 foot swells with well over 40 kt sustained winds. Luckily we were able to recover all the (~20) Ocean Bottom Seismometers were recovered before this weather pattern stuck. The crew worked around the clock generally in 18 hour shifts getting this done with the hopes of being able to recover 2 lost OBS that a previous couple cruises were unable to find. The plan was to use the DSV JASON to drive the bottom canyons where the OBS’s were believed to be. Since the weather was so rough though this was not a possibility.
Tomorrow we go in to port a day early since the weather is not going to clear in time to allow us to attempt another go at the lost OBS’s. We tried sending accoustic commands to them in hopes that we could astablish comms. Using the ships hydrophones I sat watch listening to the soothing sounds of accoustic messages and water rushing past for hours in hopes of hearing a faint reply. Alas no reply was ever heard, so those two OBS’s are still lost and only Davey Jones may know where they are.
R/V Hugh R. Sharp
Leg two of scallop population survey
July 06 2013
Days at sea: 7 since leg two
Time: 0021
Weather: Fog, 59.99oF with 96% humidity
Wind Speed 13.7kts
Sea State: 1-2ft swell
Position: 41 10.08N x 066 38.81W
The Happenings
Leg two of the survey began June 24thand left from the Sharp’s home port in Lewes Delaware. Coming into port cracks the crew’s smiles as they get to sleep in their own beds, reunite with those people and pets they miss, and of course unwind from their twenty-four-hour floating “office.” While I have not gotten too truly homesick, and continue to learn every day, I have gained a higher appreciation to those who spend at times up to two thirds of their year at sea. Seasons pass, children grow, and tomatoes ripen.
After taking care of some cleaning and the morning projects, I was given the afternoon off in between leg one and two to explore onshore. I managed to stay on land long enough to get eaten alive by bugs, buy some new books, and order various beverages…an americano included. I walked away from the Sharp and onto the hot humid beaches of the bay. Beach umbrellas and horseshoe crabs put a different beach flare than what I am used to, just another reminder that I am on the east coast. Everyone seems very friendly in small town coastal Lewes and ready for their summer.
The intention of the second leg is essentially the same, to dredge and film scallops, this time north off the southern side of Georges bank. While I expected all to be the same, the second leg has taken on a totally different character. The switch of crew both on deck and for science is partly responsible. I attest the rest of the change to weather and darkness. I now stand the night watch, 1730 to 0530 and so I begin my days with sunset and await the peek of dawn. Both night and day have been shadowed in cool fog which is different from leg one’s sunny days with “bathtub” swells.
Those who became seasick for the first few days could affirm the rougher seas. The Sharp notoriously is a rocky ship. This is due to her small keel combined with the heavy high tower used as a marine mammal observation platform. Working on deck with in the darkness and the occasional wave crashing on deck was exciting. With weather getting worse, and the anticipated 12+ foot seas and 30 knot winds the bridge decided to dock in Woodshole Massachusetts.
The unexpected three days in port so soon after leaving has made seemed to cut the trip nearly in half. We are already headed south and homeward and are currently re-tracing our dredge cruise track with the HabCam. I enjoyed my time in Woodshole and was not expecting so much onshore travel during my internship. I spent a day visiting a friend from school who is interning at WHOI for the summer. I also got to pay my respects to the tallship SSV C. Cramer of Sea Education Association (SEA). The last time I was in Woodshole was about three years ago when I was a student with SEA, I had nothing but good memories flooding back. The seas have continued to calm and we have been able to continue dredging as usual.
Marine Technician Meets Marine Critter
The most notable marine technician related events of leg two have been the failures of two ADCPs, changing the batteries on the sound velocity probe, and training to run the multi-beam sonar.
The ADCP (Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler) computer was failing to communicate with the instrument at the end of leg one. Technician from the R/V Blue Herron who was onboard helped Ted determine that the problem was a bad connection by looking at the system’s various com ports. So, once on land we pulled the ADCP out of the water where it is attached to the bottom of the keel. The keel on the Sharp it is attached to large air filled bladders which allow us to raise it. Once out of the water, large pipes on the keel where the instruments are mounted (and with cables connecting them to the ship) can be lifted out of the water using the crane.
Upon detaching the ADCP it was apparent that the cable connection had failed, as white electrolysis goo surrounded the connection. We installed the second ADCP kept on board and during our short trip from Lewes to Woodshole this one failed as well. When we pulled out instrument for the second time, we could see the same problem beginning. After some investigation as to what may be causing the problem it appears a change in cable manufacturing may be to blame. The cable itself has male and female parts (pins and holes) so it is imperative that they fit together properly. It seems that the newly designed cables have an added piece of plastic for reinforcement. This ‘bump’ can lean on the cable connection causing the holes to become more oval and putting pressure on the pins. Alas, we have no ADCP running currently. One handy trick I learned was to mix cayenne powder with the grease that coats the instrument, this slows growth of barnacles and other bio-fouling.
As far as a little midnight project goes working on the sound velocity probe was interesting. You would think changing batteries would be simple, not so. The only way Ted and I could see to get this task done was to cut the old battery free, use a wire stripper, and solder the new battery to the instrument’s wires. I watched as Ted did the real surgery and acted as his assistant. I am not sure if this was the correct way of changing the battery, but with no advise from the recent instrument servicer, it seems to have worked.
This evening, now that the dredging for this leg is complete, Ted has been training me how to start the Multibeam Sonar program. Instead of a single sound beam used to sweep the ocean’s floor like most sonar instruments, the multi-beam sends out many separate sound signals. The sonar must ‘listen’ for all of these beams as the bounce back off of the ocean floor. We will be using this program in the future and I am sure I will write more about it. To help with my training, Ted and I just composed a program procedure which I can follow (as we will no longer be on the same watch) if the system becomes overwhelmed with data and crashes.
Here is another snippet from my daily journal on my experience with dredging and deck life:
Journal Entry:
July 3rd
Time: 0239
Two pilot whales caught my eye’s with their big black fins. I had never seen a pilot whale and I considered it to be a shark at first, but the angle at which the fins disappeared under the surface, and their bearing right for our ship redirected my identification. A hop up to the bridge confirmed my sighting. Evan asked me “how did I see them?” I should have responded “I have good eyes.” Its amazing how trained the human eye can be. A person staring at the gray ocean for hours, the same in all directions, can pick out an anomaly within seconds. This trip so far I have seen numerous plastic bottles, floats or buoys, a large log, a bucket, and Ted has seen a wood pallet with a thresher shark alongside it.
Earlier this evening we did about four dredges. Notable is what the scientists term “seed.” Two of the dredges turned up ‘seed,’ petite baby scallops, no larger than a thumbnail. While difficult to count and measure, noting these “next-generation” scallops gives the scientists a good feeling especially in open fishing areas. While the these droplets of new scallops are more than numerous, they also face a high mortality rate. Mixed in with the seed were also the smaller three inch scallops which will be ready to fish in a few years. The scientists sub sample to estimate actual numbers of the baby scallops by measuring about half a liter of them-a minuscule amount compared to the multiple five gallon buckets worth. I think the seed numbers reached 60,000 for this tow.
Ok, thanks again for reading, its about 3am so I think I’ll mug-up and snoop around for a snack in the galley. I’ll try and write again soon- so far so good!
R/V Marcus G. Langseth,
01-July-13, Vigo, Spain
R/V Marcus G. Langseth: Working in Port
Hello again everyone. Well, we have been back at port for nearly a week now and we are still working on getting the engine fixed. We still don’t have a sail date, but it looks as if it will be sometime next week at the earliest. Even though we are in port, that does not mean we have time off. Oh no, we have a lot of work to be done.
For the first two days, we were still on regular shifts and so my work time was midnight to noon. For these two days, I worked on the guns with Carlos, Bern, and Robbie. During the first night, Carlos and I were tasked with looking at the shackles on all 40 guns, which means 80 shackles in total, and ensuring that they were in good condition. If we found one that wasn’t, we had to change the shackle and the bolt. This is no easy feat as the guns weigh anywhere from 80 to 100 lbs. In order to lift them up so that we could remove the shackles, we used a chain lift, wrapped it around the guns and hand cranked the gun upwards until enough stress was taken off of the shackle and chain. Once this was done, we could then remove the shackle and bolt and put new ones on. In all, we replaced about 20 shackles.
When we came to the last gun and were nearly done with changing the shackle, we noticed that the gun was not built correctly. So, we had to take the gun off and rebuilt it. Carlos, decided to let me try my luck at rebuilding the gun without him taking the lead. It was a bit nerve racking to build a gun correctly when I had only seen a gun for the first time a few weeks back. But with Carlos as my teacher I remembered a lot of the tricks he showed me and was soon able to finish the gun. I did, of course, make some mistakes, but Carlos was there to help me fix them and to give me pointers on how to make things easier.
The next day Bern, Robbie and I worked on checking the gun umbilicals. These are the cables that connect the guns to the boat through which goes air and the commands to fire. In order to check them though, I had to climb into the reels and disconnect two cables. The reels are about 2 feet wide inside and have a diameter of 5 feet. It was pretty cramped inside. Soon though, I got used to the confinement and was able to quickly and easily disconnect the cables. Once I had disconnected them though, I had to wait for Bern and Robbie to check the cables. The hole to climb in was quite small and so I stayed put inside the reel. One time though, Robbie and Bern encountered some problems and so I was in there for about 45 minutes. It didn’t seem that long to me though since I had accidentally fallen asleep waiting for them to radio me my instructions.
After the second day at port, we went on regular shifts meaning everyone works from 7:00 to 16:30. I like these shifts better as I can now eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner and don’t have left overs for my dinner. Since we went on day shifts, we have been attempting to reorganize the boat. My job, along with the gun mechanics, is to organize all of the cables used for the guns. They were currently in a shelving unit, but we had to remove it and move it to another lab and so we had to make our own shelf or cable holder. We discussed ideas about what we could do and we soon started to work. To my surprise, it was my idea that they decided to use. It should be done fairly soon and we will see how well my design works.
Well, that is all that is going on with me. It does look like the cruise will be extended however I will not be able to continue if it is extended as I have other work lined up. I will stay as long as I can and I hope that the engine gets fixed soon. Take care everyone.
– This is Tyler Poppenwimer, signing off –
This past week has been exceedingly hectic to the point that I didn’t realize it was friday until I just now when I updated this blog. Ship time is a different thing sometimes.
I just spent the past hour in the Jason Deep Submersible ROV van. It is a tiny 40 square foot box with more tv’s and xbox controllers and odd specialized controllers than anywhere else I have ever seen. Quite simply I watched them attach a shackle to a trawl resistant mooring so it could be brought to the surface. Now connecting a shackle is simple on the surface. But when you are 300 meters below the surface in 15 foot viz water and your only depth perception is being able to zoom in and out on camera this simple task becomes an ballet of skin. The manipulator arms are nearly four foot long with little graspy hands at the ends of fully rotatable wrists. The pilot maneuvered these hands with the precision of a heart surgeon. This is another one of those times where the written word fails to describe the amazing feat of ingenuity and dexterity of the actual action accomplished. But if you would like to see this happening live we are broadcasting live streaming video from the ship.
It can be viewed at explorationnow.org/atlantis
R/V Marcus G. Langseth,
25-June-13, Vigo, Spain
R/V Marcus G. Langseth: BREAKing News
Well, I thought that I was going to write about what life is like on a boat for this blog post, but the past few days have been interesting. A few days ago, our port side engine broken down. We were forced to bring in all of the guns, and streamers, and head to port to get it fixed. As I am writing this, we just pulled into the port in Vigo, Spain. This does not mean that there isn’t work to do, but it is a bit of a change of pace from being out on the ocean.
The day the engine broke started out like any other day, but at about 2:00 am, we all noticed a strange rumbling sound and then just as suddenly, it started to fade away. As it faded though it kept getting quieter and quieter. Soon it was nearly dead silent. One of the engines had gone out. This was bad as we couldn’t maintain our speed to keep the streamers and guns trailing behind us for very long with one engine. The engineers quickly went to check the scene, but were dismayed to find that it was a major problem. The call went out to pull everything in.
I quickly grabbed my harness, a hard hat, and a float coat and rushed up to the gun deck to meet Robbie and Carlos (the gun mechanics on my shift) to help them take out the guns. We immediately began our work. Carlos and I hooked up our monkey tails and undid the safety net while Robbie began to pull in the gun strings. Once the gun string got close, it was only a matter of time before we finally had all of the guns on deck. We did a little bit of maintenance, while we waited for the streamer team to assemble.
Once assembled, I then went up to the streamer deck and began to lend a hand bringing in the streamer. After about 5 minutes working with the streamer crew, Robbie and Carlos called me up to the vein deck to help them bring in the door. Thus, I ran up one more deck and began to help them bring in the door. We were about half way to bringing in the door, it is out about 500 meters from the boat, when the waves picked up and so we weren’t able to bring the door the rest of the way in. Luckily though, we had brought it in enough so that we could bring up the streamers.
I went back down to the streamer deck and helped in any way I could. Each member of the group was assigned a task. Mine was to help take off the birds and SSRDs and once removed, I was to go and disassemble them and place them in their holders. We were bringing up two streamers simultaneously and so I was busily running back and forth between streamers taking off birds and SSRDs and disassembling them.
Just before my shift ended, the seas calmed enough to bring the door on so I went and helped bring in the door. My job was to use a large hook on the end of a rope to hook a giant metal ring on the door. Imagine one of those carnival games where you try to hook a duck on a fishing pole and expand the length to about 25 feet and the weight of the hook to 10 pounds and you have my job. After numerous attempts though, I finally managed to hook the ring and we could bring up the door. With the door brought in my shift was done and I could go to bed.
When I woke up the next day the rest of the streamers had been brought in and the other door as well. We were also on our way towards Vigo, Spain to meet an engineer who could possible fix our broken engine. I learned that the head of the engine had cracked, water and oil were mixed throughout the engine, and one of the pistons was messed up. It might take a long time to get fixed once we finally get into Vigo, but were hopeful that all will go well and we will be out in the ocean soon.
Take care everyone.
– This is Tyler Poppenwimer, signing off –
R/V Hugh R. Sharp
Leg one of scallop population survey
June 22 2013
Days at sea: 9
Time: 1859
Weather: Sunny and 69.89oF with 76% humidity
Wind Speed 5.1kn
Sea State: 1-2ft swells
Position: 39 34.35N x 073 26.78W
The Basics
Just as if I had blinked my eyes and held them closed for a second too long, the entire first week at sea has seemed to pass over the time span of just a few watches. The rest of the crew is itching for our return to land and completion of the first two week leg where some of us will have only a day to put our feet on solid ground, and where others from both the ship’s crew and the science crew have completed their time on the Sharp until the next cruise calls. Luckily I feel like I have just gotten started with my summer here on the Sharp. In a way, this is true as we will be aiming to go further north towards Georges Bank and will be sailing all of July.
So much has happened thus far so I will start with the descriptive basics. I stand watch with technician Ted C. during the day watch. While some science cruises choose to adopt a six hours on watch six hours off watch schedule, we all opted for the 12 on 12 off, with day watch beginning at 0530-1730. The reason for the long watch is sea slime. While I expected to come off the cruise smelling of scallops, I really could not have expected how fully covered I could get, head to toe, in sea-slime from the various organisms that make it to the surface in our dredges. The scallops themselves are not too slippery, but the sea-stars ooze immensely, the sand-dollars foam a spring-green liquid, and the fish flop in their own secretions. Shower time at the end of watch (instead of every six hours) comes only second favorite to dinner time.
For the Good of Science
There are two main science motivated goals of the cruise. The first being to physically dredge the bottom of the ocean floor for scallops at mostly random locations along traditional scallop fishing territories. The second, still with scallops in mind, is to tow a specialized real-time camera a few meters above the ocean floor to continually photograph the scallops in their natural habitat.
This camera is called the HabCam. One ability which makes the R/V Sharp unique is that it has a deployable fiber-optic cable that attaches to the HabCam and is capable of communicating real-time data back to the ship. This allows the science crew to treat the HabCam as a remote operated vehicle in a sense as they can change its position by letting more or less of the cable release from the ship’s winch while viewing data in the ship’s lab.
I may have painted an incorrect image of the trailing HabCam, it is much larger than just a camera tossed overboard. The camera is mounted on a rectangular steal frame, somewhat cage shaped with the addition of a ‘second-story.’ Overall the HabCam configuration weighs ~3500 lbs leading to an awkward deployment and retrieval which takes place on a ramp secured to the port side of the stern.
Besides the camera itself and the four strobes which bring light to the camera, the frame of the HabCam is also equipped with multiple CTDs (the classic oceanographic instrument which measures conductivity, temperature, and depth from which one can calculate salinity) one of which is taking dissolved oxygen readings. There is also a side-scan sonar which produces a relatively detailed image of the ocean floor and an instrument set to specifically measure the wavelengths indicating chlorophyll and CDOM which correlate with the photosynthetic primary producers in the ecosystem. A full spectrum spectrometer records the remaining wavelengths, and the altimeter and GPS report back on the HabCam’s position. There is also a sensor photographing plankton in the water column, primarily zooplankton.
HabCam N’ Scallop’n
Life on the ship takes on a different pace during a scallop dredge than when the HabCam is in the water. We began this leg with a multiple day HabCam track, then went to several days of dredging, and currently the HabCam is back in the water and has been for the past two watches.
When the camera is in the water I focus mainly on helping Ted maintain the winch readouts (which we have had some significant trouble shooting issues around…it was discovered that a circuit board was damaged by a voltage leak and we will be replacing it when we come into port on Monday) or with any other small projects necessary. Thus far I have worked on mapping out quite exactly the set up of the wet lab, and the back deck where we dredge. Having a map is a good reminder for both the crew and science and hopefully it will be helpful in future cruise planning and setup. I am also responsible for testing the CTD daily and recording air temperatures, humidity, and data from the ship’s GPS and ADCP (Acoustic Doppler Current profiler, used to measure ocean currents). Everyday I also check the filter and flush fresh water through the ships flow through system. This system takes constant data from the surface waters as we are underway, such as seawater temperature, salinity, and fluorometer readings.
It is currently 1800 and we just finished dinner-I want to go into descriptive detail about scallop dredging as it has been the most active, and a quite favored part of the trip so far, but I think It will have to wait for the next post.
To give some insight about dredging I have included a selection from my daily journal, written three days ago:
Journal Entry:
June 20 (and writing for the 19th)
0107
Nearly each trawl brings up a new mix of organisms. Today things were a little less “back-to-back” with about an hour between every transect. I would imagine as large as the ocean is that this amount of time would not lead to such variable a catch. Even yesterday when our transects were closer together, almost no dredge brought up the same. While Science has to remain unbiased, a dredge full of scallops is undeniably what gets the crew most excited. When Evan is on watch the fisherman in him is always there looking down on us with his binoculars that moment the dredge gets inverted on the table. The mounds of scallops at their largest have taken up about one quarter of a table maybe a foot and a half high. To me, especially when I’m on the table shoveling them, this seems like a lot of scallops but the boys tell me this is just a warm up compared to the third leg on Georges bank. I am working on my arm muscles now!
The dredge after dredge which has been dumped onboard carrying mounds of sea-stars or mounds of sand-dollars and mud show me how the commercial scallop fishing must take skill and knowledge. The scallops apparently are very particular in their environment and favor a specific temperature, substrate composition, and often importantly depth.
Thanks for reading!
Love to the family my Mom, Dad, Alan, Omi and Gram. I’m excited to come land-side soon to give you all a call…Happy Summer. I still sleep very well on ships, missing R.C.S.
So here I am in Astoria Oregon, famous for the movie The Goonies being filmed here. It is a small port town with plenty of bars for libations. I went exploring, walking up and down the main streets for several hours just trying to get a feel for the town. It was disturbingly empty. It seems from what I have been told it is a tourist town that relies heavily on the cruise ship industry. The stores are definitely geared toward a tourist market most definitely. In order to get warmer clothes I had to wait for someone to rent a car and ride in with them across a bridge to a place called Fred Meyers or something similar, which is basically a Walmart with a different name. It seems in my attempt to pack a well rounded selection of clothing for this six month world tour that I neglected to pack enough warm things. Seeing as it was summer I was not assuming 50 degrees and rainy would be that common. Boy was I wrong. So after procuring some more hoodies the couple crew members and I ended up going to a state park nearby. This was awesome. I saw mountains right next to the beach. This has been a wholly unimaginable sight for someone who has spent the vast majority of her life on the east coast in southern states.
So there we were on a beach, yeah we spend all our time on the water and go to it as soon as we get off a boat, if you are drawn to this work it makes sense, but is still slightly comical. There were mountains all around us on, and an old shipwreck sitting on the beach that had all but rusted completely away. Ship wrecks are one of the few things that truly make me shudder when I see them. So I didn’t want to spend much time there. The second most remarkable thing was the sand was a mixture of dark and light sands so the beach took on this Tim Burtonesque type of feel, with the washed up trees from the local logging industry adding a spice of strange contours to the striped sands. People had actually built several small pseudo dwellings that could have been fairy forts or some such magical thing had this actually been a Tim Burton movie.
Then we drove around a bit and found another part of this park that was more wilderness. We started out climbing on old World War II bunkers that were built to help defend the west coast. Then we came to a trail that we decided to walk down. The beauty of this lush green landscape is not something I had seen in months, so it kind of seemed weird and out of place with what my present world is like. There was moss and ferns growing everywhere. The evergreen trees were giants among the leaf bearing trees. They had moss hanging down in large whimsical spirals and sheets that seemed to almost give the trees a monastic look as if these were ancient monks from some elder tribe of people. Then we started getting bit by the largest mosquitoes I have ever gotten bit by. Having been on a boat for several months I didn’t really think about this, plus being a spur of the moment adventure no one brought bug spray. So there we were traipsing through the forest of elder monks donating our blood to their mosquito protectors. I was bitten more than a hundred times easily in the course of our jaunt. The only respite from the plague of buzzing hypodermic terrors I could find was by lighting a cigarette. I had been told years ago by an uncle that smoking helped keep the bugs away, and it did indeed seem to help at least keep them away from my face and hands. The rest of my body did not fare so well.
So if you ever find yourself headed to Astoria might I suggest more warm things than you think you might need and plenty of bug spray if you are planning on enjoying any of the amazing wilderness trails that abound in this area of the world.
R/V Marcus G. Langseth,
19-June-13, The Study Site
R/V Marcus G. Langseth: A Daily Routine on the Boat
Hello everyone! I thought I would use this blog post to talk about what my daily routine on the boat is like. Since I last posted there hasn’t been a lot going on besides the regular data collection, we did have to weather our way through a storm but other than that life has been proceeding as normal and hence why I am now writing about what life is like on the boat.
So, my work shift is from midnight to noon every day. As such, my day begins about an hour before work. I get up and get ready and then head down to the galley to get some food before my shift. The first meal that is served by the crew isn’t until 7:20 am so I grab something small to eat and then go to the main lab. Once there I talk to everyone to see what is going on and if everything looks like it is going well. Oft times there is not much happening besides the routine monitoring, but sometimes there are problems that need to be attended to. When there aren’t problems, I head over to an open seat and begin monitoring the data.
Monitoring the data isn’t all that exciting but it is a necessity. If there is an open chair at the guns monitoring station then my job is to watch the gun data to ensure that if a problem with a gun occurs it is recorded and if for some reason a whole shot is missing that it is recorded as well. If I am at the navigation station, my job is to make sure that our streamers are in the correct position. If they aren’t then I have to steer the ship into the correct position using a plus and minus button to move the ship closer or farther away from the line. This station involves the most work as the currents can more our streamers into very different positions from the ship and requires nearly constant monitoring. The final monitoring position is the data position where I monitor the bathymetry data being collected and keep a log of data about our positions, speed, ocean conditions, and the weather, every 30 minutes. Personally, I like the navigation position because it keeps my attention and I get to steer the ship.
While monitoring equipment, I also help Carlos, one of the gun mechanics, every two hours. Because there is such strain on the cables that hold the doors close to the boat, they need to be moved a little bit so that the same portion isn’t being strained. As such, I go up to the vein deck and help Carlos move the cables in and out. I also sometimes lend him a hand preparing the guns and also cleaning and repairing the trolleys that hold the guns up on deck.
Other than my meals of which usually occur at 3:00 am, 7:20 am and 12:00 am not much else really occurs during my shift, unless of course there are problems. My meal at 3:00 am is a dinner from the night before that the cooks have saved me while the 7:20 am meal is breakfast and the meal at 12:00 is lunch. After lunch, I usually go back to my cabin to relax a bit, do laundry if needed, and then go to bed and get ready to start the next day.
Well, that is pretty much my daily routine on the boat. For my next post, if no major events occur, I plan on talking about what life is like on the boat. I will also talk about the crew, grad students, and principal investigators that I work with during my shift and how all of us work together to make the data collection a reality. Take care everyone.
– This is Tyler Poppenwimer, signing off –