Category: Vessel/Laboratory Page 43 of 89

We made it back to Miami on Sunday afternoon. We tied up the ship and helped the scientists unload equipment. Then we cleaned up the deck and 

We have been looking into installing exhaust fans for the engine rooms. Most ships have good exhaust fans in the engine room to keep good air flow and pump the bad air out. Our engine rooms have supply fans but not exhaust fans. So our air flow is not that great. So we looked into installing fans. We ordered two large fans. We are looking to install them on the top of our exhaust stacks. The top of the stakes have large vents on their aft sides so we decided it was the perfect place to mount the fans. We unbolted the vent cover on the starboard side to access the top of the stack to get all our measurements. We also looked at our braker panel to figure out how we were going to wire the fan in. We found an open breaker to wire the fan and I calculated the wire gage we would need for it. We then bolted on some spacers to the frame of the fan so it would fit perfectly with minimal movement when we had it mounted in. We attached the weirs to the fan before we lifted it into place. We then had to hoist it up into place and bolt it in. Once it was in we wired it to the ship’s power with a switch. We could then put the vent cover back into place. The fan worked great. Now we will just have to do the starboard fan once we have some more time.

This is the fan in place!

We left the dock at 8am on monday morning. Once we were out of the channel we went to our normal cruising shifts. Everything was going pretty smoothly till tuesday night. I went down to check the port engine room. I saw water spraying out from around the propeller shaft and the water was already at foot and a half deep. It was all the way up to the bottom of the engine and the gearbox. I went and alerted the crew then went back down to the engine room. I shut the engine down then located the source of the leak. Our propeller shaft dripless seal had failed. Lots of water was pouring in. I was able to clamp the two parts together with my hands to stop the water till the crew and engineer could come down to help. Once help arrived Don and I worked at stopping the leak with clamps and the crew got to work pumping the water out. It looked like there was no damage to the seal, it had just come loose for some reason. We worked all night and the next day to try and get it back together. But everything had to be perfect to get a good seal. We didn’t have all the tools or knowledge to do this on our own. So we had the technician that installed the coupling while we were in the Tampa shipyard come to Fort Myers to meet us. We picked up the tech in our small boat and brought him out to the ship. With his help the three of us fixed the seal. We did a sea trial and then brought the tech back to Fort Myers. After that the rest of the week went pretty smoothly.

I coated the port engine with rustlock to help prevent future rust. I then used a high temperature paint to add a new fresh coat. I let it dry for the day, then the next day I added another coat of paint.

 Our transducer came back from california where it was being repaired and updated on Thursday. We then set to work getting everything ready and set up to re-install it. We bolted the transducer to the mounting plate and used 5200 on all the bolts to keep it sealed from water. We let it sit overnight to dry. The next day we installed it in the bottom of the transducer well. We used pipe dope and teflon tape to make a good seal around the mounting bolts. We decided we would let this sit over the weekend to dry and we would add water and test everything out on Monday.

I coated the port engine with rustlock to help prevent future rust. I then used a high temperature paint to add a new fresh coat. I let it dry for the day, then the next day I added another coat of paint.

 Our transducer came back from california where it was being repaired and updated on Thursday. We then set to work getting everything ready and set up to re-install it. We bolted the transducer to the mounting plate and used 5200 on all the bolts to keep it sealed from water. We let it sit overnight to dry. The next day we installed it in the bottom of the transducer well. We used pipe dope and teflon tape to make a good seal around the mounting bolts. We decided we would let this sit over the weekend to dry and we would add water and test everything out on Monday.

This week we worked on cleaning up the port engine room. We scrubbed everything down with degreaser. We also cleaned the bilges. Once the engine was cleaned I removed all the rust from it and prepared it to be painted. I also found 5 different wires that were just cut and not dead ended properly along the engine room wall. I tested them to make sure there was no power coming from them. Then I taped them off and marked them so they can be removed later. We did a test on our fore peak bilge and found a hole about a quarter of an inch around on the overboard pipe. I made up a patch and fixed it.

We were working on Tatiana, the ship’s small boat. There has been a problem with the motor tilt. There are two controls, one on the console and the other is on the outboard motor itself. I started trouble shooting the trim. While I was working on it I noticed one of the ground weirs from the engine to the hull was starting to overheat. This meant there was a grounding problem as well. I went though and tested all the weirs with an amp clamp meter. To find where the electricity was finding its way back through the hull. There are two batteries on the boat, a start battery and an auxiliary battery. The start battery was grounded to the aluminum hull with two weirs for some reason. I looked closer and tested all the battery cables and discovered that they were wired completely wrong. The tilt was getting its power though the starter cable from the start battery. The problem is the negative return was attached to the auxiliary battery negative. The auxiliary negative cabe was hooked up to the start battery. So the two were switched. This is why the power was finding its way back to the stat battery through the weirs that grounded it to the hull. The fact that the battery was grounded to the hull was weird. There is no good reason for it on this boat let alone the fact it was done with two wires is even stranger. The batters should have been wired in parallel which they weren’t which gave me a hit to what the two ground weirs were from. Whoever did the wiring for the battery last used the paralleling wires as a ground and then switched up the two negative cables. I re-wired everything correctly and removed the battery ground from the hull. There is no good reason to ground the battery on this aluminum boat with two batteries as the only power source. First it caused me problems with figuring out the tilt issue. It’s also a fire hazard because the grounding wire that the power was going through was too small for the load and started to smoke from all the amps going through it. This could start a fire if it went on long enough. Another problem this presents is the battery ground could cause a shock hazard. If you were touching the hull and then touched the engine or something else that was getting power to it you could get a shock. Without a battery ground this would be impossible the only way you could get shocked is if you were touching the negative battery post while touching the engine or something else receiving power. Once I finished rewiring the batteries I tested everything out and everything worked.

This week we did our load tests on the ship’s cranes. They need to be able to hold 125% of their load limit for 5 minutes to pass the test for our NSF inspection. We have giant wheels from train cars that weigh around 800 pounds each. These wheels are normally used to anchor buoys and are stored on campus. We only needed 5 and some extra smaller weights to get to 4,125 pounds. Both cranes were able to hold the wait and pass the test.

During our trip we got a lot of lobster traps and fishing gear caught around our propellers. So we had to dive in today to cut off all the lines so we would be ready to go out whenever we needed to. We have dive gear on board the ship for this job and I have all my dive certifications. Each propeller had a lot more line on them than I thought they would. We cut and unwrapped all the lines. In some spots we had to use scrapers because the lines caused so much friction they melted to the prop shaft. We piled up all the cut lines up on the deck. 

We changed the oil and serviced our starboard generator . We change out the raw water impeller. The old one looked like it was starting to crack. We took apart the air intake and the heat exchanger and cleaned them out. We also took a look at the turbo’s bearings to make sure they were ok. We then cleaned it up and did a little touch up painting.

I ended up working on our radar system on Sunday because it was not working and we were supposed to leave on Monday. I was not able to fix it on Sunday on my own. The trip ended up being pushed back a day. I spent the day on Monday working with the radar tech. I learned alot about the system. By the end of the day we found that it was the board and magnetron in the radar antenna. We replaced them and the radar fired right up. 

We left on Tuesday morning. Once we got out to the gulf stream we did our first CTD cast. Unfortunately we started having problems with our oxygen sensors. We pulled the CTD back on deck and switched out the sensor with a spare we had on board. That did not fix the problem. We ended up using a different CTD port to see if that would fix the problem and it did. But we had to unplug something else to test the oxygen sensor. So we need to find what information the scientists didn’t need so we could remove that piece of equipment and have the port open for the oxygen sensor. We ended up eliminating our surface par. We did not have any more issues with the CTD for the rest of the trip. The trip went very smoothly after that. We had the same watch schedule as we had for when we did our tampa transit. We got back on saturday, but we had to keep an eye on the weather because it looks like another storm might be heading our way. We ended up not going up the river  this time because the storm kept moving to the south so it was projected to miss us.  

This week Denis and I needed to test the CTD because we are going to be using it on the 13th for our first real science trip since I’ve gotten started. We were having trouble with the CTD communicating with the computer. We need to test all the parts of the system between the CTD and the computer. We also decided to make a new termination for the sea cable. The CTD is lowered into the water using the sea cable, the sea cable has three power wires in the core and is wrapped with steel cable on the outside which gives the cable strength and also acts as the ground. We used a megameter to test all the wires. The megameter tests to see if there are any unwanted connections between weirs in the system. We tested the whole system and got a bad reading. So we had to break the system down into parts to narrow down the problem. We found a bad cable from the slip ring on the winch that goes into the winch cab. So we replaced that cable, but we still were getting a bad reading. We found some breaks in the weirs insulation on the weirs that run up from the CTD to the cable so we replaced them too. Once Denis and I finished the new termination we hooked everything back up and tested it out and it worked. 

We left on our trip at about 7am. We just needed to go out to the gulf stream and do two CTD casts. One at 5 meters and another at 700 meters. We had a few issues with the CTD not communicating with the computer again. We narrowed the problem back down to the weirs that ran from the CTD to the sea cable. So we ended up removing them all together and attaching the sea cable directly to the CTD. We did our 5 meter cast and it seemed to work well. So then we lowered the CTD to 700 meters and we ran into more problems. We were not getting confirmation that the bottles were firing off or not. So we endup rebooting everything and we got it to work this time but we would have to look into it more when we got back. 

On friday we ended up replacing the whole CTD with our back up so we would not have any problems for our next trip which was scheduled for monday. We got the new one installed and tested it and everything worked well.