I have been assigned to work with the Lamont Doherty Observatory of Columbia University for this cruise. After many delays from Navy inspections we finally left port and headed to recover the scientific instruments from the sea. There was overcast throughout the first and half of the second week so it all looks the same whether it is 9AM or 9PM. The sun doesn’t fully until about 10PM so there’s a lot of daylight on the west coast. I was part of a team if 6 charged with retrieving 30 Ocean Bottom Seismometer or OBS for short. More than half of them were TRM which are Trawl Resistant versions of the OBS. Encased in a steel shell weighing about a ton each the TRMs were difficult to get on board. Operations were for 24hrs so we rest whenever we can in between each instrument. We were equipped with a winch which had a heave compensation system allowing it to adjust for the pitch and roll of the ship to maintain the stress of the line when hauling a TRM out of the water. We had the help of JASON from WHOI, a remote under water ROV to help us find some of the instruments that didn’t respond to our radio. The crew of the Thompson was a HUGE help of which I cannot emphasize enough, without them we probably would have taken at least twice as long. And also the student that came along also gave us a hand. Once on board we had to strip and clean the TRM of all its parts leaving but the steel shell to get refurbished for the next deployment. Before the previous deployment they used a lot of Aqua Shield which is some teal colored lithium based grease to help water proof some of the cables. It is terrible to deal with and it never gets off your clothes or your hands. Along with the TRM came many creatures of the deep and a lot of sea mud, which smelled terrible, made from organic waste it’s about the closest thing you can get to manure that isn’t excrement. There were many sea stars and other stranger creatures. On this cruise we were also able to see some whales, dolphins, and even a sunfish. Overall I had a great experience and met a lot of people. The MATE program had presented me the best opportunity I could ever ask for and following this I will continue to work with the Lamont group.
Category: Vessel/Laboratory Page 85 of 89
Back at the dock now, The connectivity would hot have made blogging practical, over the last couple of weeks, so I am writing this after the fact. We left port in a gale and the first two days were pretty darn rough. Everybody did just fine though, once they got their sea legs – me included. The mission was to emplace and retrieve Ocean Bottom Electromagnetic Receivers used by Scripps Researcher Kerry Keys and his coworkers to map the resistivity of the Cascadia Plate and to use that data to interpret how water moves in the descending crust. It was a pleasure to watch his team in action. They were better than the military – the same precision, but with more continuity and fewer “oh drat” moments, so often caused in the military by high turnover. These guys had this down to…well, a science:)
I injected myself into the noon to midnight watch and helped them on deck with the placements and recoveries. It was an education. The first few nights we had some real “Deadliest Catch” moments, with 10-foot seas breaking over the fan tail! Everything was done safely though and the ship’s crew was very patient and professional.
The weather moderated after that and we got a break. It was fascinating to see the development of the routine of the watches, the division of labor, the interactions between the ship’s crew and the science party (all very productive and professional). The rhythm of life aboard ship was interesting: the importance of meals, the value of a good cook, the watch-sleep-watch cycle, the pattern of resting, eating and working that form the entirety of your day at sea. This was compounded by a near complete lack of connectivity so, barring slow emails, there was very little contact with home.
It was funny to see the news, “Hey, I have two bars.” race through the ship when we passed near land and got cellular contact. Everyone made time to call home, check Facebook and emails, and text loved ones. I was probably the worst, since I was hungry to hear from my family.
In the interim, between times on deck, I was working on a project for my mentor. He had me construct a microcontroller based spray wash system for the CTD cable, with a webpage interface. I am no programmer, but I know a darn sight more now than I did two weeks ago. Staring into a computer trying to figure out how to break a string into a separate array at the first carriage return in rough weather is a recipe for an urpy stomach. I had to take routine breaks to get fresh air. But I was able to get the thing working, and I learned a great deal in the process.
In the last three weeks I have used many of the skills I have learned already; soldering, electrical circuit construction, basic programming, cable management, deck operations, to name a few. But it is clear to me that I have a lot to learn about networking computers and advanced programming. Fortunately, I have several more weeks to work with these folks and sharpen those skills.
June 7th
Got picked up from Salisbury along with Brent. TR, the deckhand who picked us up, broke some bad news when I got in the car. The ship had suffered a pretty serious motor failure the previous day. Nobody knew what happened or how long the repairs would take, but it sounded like we wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while. During the car ride TR told us all about the scallop survey, the crew, and life on the ship. I learned a lot- some exciting and some worrying.
I got to the ship and was welcomed aboard. I was actually here! Everything on the ship was unfamiliar and overwhelmingly cool. The scientists were loading equipment with the deck crane and everybody was working. I met a whole bunch of people in quick succession including my mentor, Ted. Ted started as a MATE intern and is now Sharp’s lead technician. He showed me my room, which I had to myself for now, and gave me a quick tour of the ship. I pretty much followed Ted around for the rest of the day asking questions.
R/V Hugh R Sharp is a relatively new and incredibly high-tech vessel built to conduct a wide range of research. There are computer displays everywhere, an special crane system for the carousel, a big A-frame with two large winches (one fiberoptic). Four big diesel generators power the ship and run two electric Z-drives. Actually, only one z-drive at the moment. The modular deck is set up to be reconfigured with different equipment, as are the large dry and wet labs. The dry lab is currently packed with computers from the scientists. The ship can hold two 20 foot vans (interchangeable container-like rooms) one of which is onboard and set up to measure scallops. The bridge looks like something out of star trek: Three big chairs, a semi-circle of screens, several control panels, and joysticks instead of a wheel. The bridge wraps all the way around for a 360? view and has a mini-control center in the rear for steering or operating cranes.
Already I felt like I should be doing something and helping. But I had no idea what to do or how to do anything. Everyone was talking about the motor and waiting for information. Standing by to stand by. I helped the cook load some groceries, then we were all given the day off. We spent it at the beach. Definitely exactly what I was expecting for the first day of my internship, but a great way to get to know some of the crew and hear their stories, advice, and opinions about working on the ship.
The plan is to work on maintenance and preparations while we sit at the dock. It sounds like there’s a lot to do, the ship has a long list of neglected and broken things. In port we work 7am-3pm monday-friday instead of a rotating watch. Most of the crew live nearby in town and are not staying on the ship overnight. The scientists stay here though.
The starboard drive motor has been removed through a large deck hatch and brought to a repair company in dover. I don’t know the extent of damage but I’ve heard people say it was pretty bad. While we wait for the motor, we’re fixing broken/neglected stuff, preparing equipment, and the scientists are setting up their gear.
June 8th
Two main sampling techniques are going to be used for this scallop survey: a simple scallop dredge and the HABCAM v4. The HABCAM (Habitat Camera) is basically a big towed camera that photographs the sea floor and creates a continuous ribbon of pictures. It doesn’t disturb the bottom the way a dredge does and can provide a whole lot of interesting data. Its heavy stainless steel frame is just smaller than a car and holds the camera, flashes, and several other sensors including a sidescan sonar unit. It’s towed just over the bottom and sends images up our fiberoptic winch cable.
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/D1HSs3TnSdOSaUJf-RjAGrmVY76ceysKV-lKjL5QGt8 HABCAM being positioned on deck whith the crane.
The scientists spent the day working to re-terminate and attach our fiber cable, which apparently is not an easy task. The cable is spliced and epoxied into a large metal fitting which bolts to the habcam. They had to do a pull-test to set the cable into the epoxy and make sure it was strong enough. We attached the fitting to the deck and pulled 11,000 pounds of tension on it with the winch. It held.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-cfmF468GCz4/U7G6l_U6lFI/AAAAAAAAJfg/yavRFiFBEXo/s1200/_MG_4529.jpg HABCAM cable termination
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Wcmm716_W-k/U7G6YKMlHcI/AAAAAAAAJcw/j7JsApE7RL0/s512/IMG_0086.JPG pull test
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-RIFy4pzf5gI/U7G6mfBZ0BI/AAAAAAAAJfk/CiVJ8l4nP2g/s800/_MG_4562.jpg and dunk test
Later in the evening I went to the movies with some of the scientists. It seems like the crew and the scientists tend to separate themselves. Technicians are in an interesting place in the middle. I like our science people and want to get to know them better.
June 9th
There was supposed to be a fiberoptic internet cable running under the parking lot so that the boat has high speed internet while in port. We hooked it up but it wasn’t working. Instead, we ran a few hundred feet of cat5 cable from the building, high over the driveway and to the ship. It didn’t work immediately and we spent a few days messing with network stuff.
Brent, the technician who came to the ship with me, left. UNOLS can’t pay him to sit around without the ship going anywhere.
To be honest, things here are a little more chaotic, unregulated, and SNAFU than I was expecting. I’m slightly worried about some of it. Sharp, though young, has streaks of rust down the sides of her white hull. A bunch of systems are broken. Stuff isn’t strapped down for heavy seas. All the high-tech design features add over-complication and more things to break. I’ve already heard plenty of complaints, “office politics”, and seen some questionably safe things. There’s less of an oppressively safety-first atmosphere and less motivation that I’ve experienced elsewhere. I suppose I got used to the procedures and attitude at Sea Education Association, where they go WAY above and beyond with safety, caring for the ship, keeping order, and doing everything exactly by the books. But SEA has to- they’re training people and bringing new students far out to sea. Things on the Sharp are a little more “practical”. I think the problems are mostly due to us being stuck at the dock without most of the crew aboard. Everybody says that it will be entirely different once we put to sea.
June 10
Apparently the motor “lost it’s field” (whatever that means) and burned out. It’s salvageable but needs new brush mounts. These are a pretty simple-looking part, however they’re made of a weird alloy that has to be special ordered or custom forged. Nobody seems to know what actually caused the motor to burn out. Hopefully we can get the parts and be out in a few days.
We went into town to buy some tools, equipment, and gear. It turns out that the foul weather stuff is for working with the scallops and dredge; we need the real heavy fisherman kind instead of what I had. My boots also aren’t tall or waterproof enough. They got me a set of Grundens.
Max (one of the ships techs) and I spent a lot of this week cleaning out the flowthrough system. The followthrough system allows scientists to continuously collect basic water quality data by pumping sea water through a series of sensors that take measurements. Someone had run it improperly and left salt water sitting in it. Everything inside was coated with sludgy algae. Max and I drained the system then disassembled the tubes and machines to clean everything out. Somehow, there had been full-grown barnacles living in this thing! Hopefully they weren’t eating too much plankton before it got to the fluromoeter. Not that it would read properly anyway because they were living in the cuvette as well. We thought that the cleaning the flowthrough system would be an afternoon project at most- just snaking out the pipes. In reality, it took about four days.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-q1Id6oPyKIc/U7G6aBmZ8RI/AAAAAAAAJdA/mD2HnFhi2HI/s800/IMG_0130.JPG Working on the flowthrough system.
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-uso7pdrJNbQ/U7G6ZkHAH0I/AAAAAAAAJc8/6ekj8Gn4alE/s800/IMG_0122.JPG That’s a declicate cuvette completely full of barnacles.
June 11th
Finally finished with the flowthrough, Ted asked me to design a waterproof box for an ethernet hub in the doghouse (winch control booth on deck). I took measurements and found an otterbox that will be perfect once modified. Ted ordered it.
The Sharp has a tall flybridge which raises our center of gravity but is a great platform for mounting antennas and spotting things in the water. Today us techs ran cables through the ship and installed a new set of 4g antennas up on the top. These will give us a pretty good internet connection when we’re within range of cell towers.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-D3s-gi3cXiM/U7G6clKNHWI/AAAAAAAAJdY/E9_GgZnxoxU/s800/IMG_0151.JPG There are definitely not enough antennas up there. Lets add more!
Working aloft was a lot of fun. I already feel like a real part of the crew. I think we all mesh very well- in large part because we share a similar crude and sarcastic sense of humor. I love it, it makes every job more fun.
The engineers fixed a problem with the sewage system and also got the bow thruster back online. It was a good day. Things got done.
We saw a huge sea turtle right here in the harbor, probably a loggerhead. There are also diamondback terrapins all over the place. Our marina is right at the mouth of an estuary, next to a big salt marsh and nature preserve. There’s a remarkable amount of life here. Schools of fish, diverse birds, and plenty of fishermen. It seems to be an strikingly healthy, flourishing ecosystem. There are several osprey nests, one of which is on a pole about a hundred feet from the ship. In it, two attentive parents are raising an adorable fledgeling. The Sharp’s flybridge is just about level with the nest, we can easily see them bring fish back and feed the baby.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-I6meiyMbWVY/U7G6oXJvoOI/AAAAAAAAJgI/AFHgLXTstc4/s1200/_MG_5503.jpg See? Turtle.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-LUM_7zT5_SE/U7G6nbirj8I/AAAAAAAAJf0/NIX_ehk8pwM/s1200/_MG_5408%2520srgb.jpg
Osprey family.
Speaking of food, the food onboard has been great! Paul is a good cook.
June 12
We had to take the sketchy parking lot ethernet cable down, then put it back up again. Sort of annoying and dangerous. Anything for that high speed connection though!
The scientists finished their setup and went back to woods hole at 5am. They can’t sit around while the boat isn’t going anywhere. I feel pretty bad for them, hopefully this delay doesn’t impact their projects too much.
Ted asked me to organize our spare parts, which are kept in the forward storage room. That bow compartment is also where all the nonperishable food and drinks are kept. Since we had recently taken on food that nobody put away, I couldn’t get past it to reach most of our tech stuff. I spent most of the day cleaning up and organizing food stores. I wasn’t really supposed to move all the food around, but it was in my way. Luckily the cook and captain both said they appreciated it. Once our food was out of the way I straightened up and consolidated the boxes of tech stuff and made sure they were as secure as possible. I couldn’t properly inventory everything because I’m just learning with most of the random cables are for. This was a perfect way to start getting familiar with what we have onboard.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-5vHNt5hyfp0/U7G6d4B0pDI/AAAAAAAAJek/8yH3Jj7Borg/s512/IMG_0178.JPG before
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-kakSc7xmYsQ/U7G6ehglQfI/AAAAAAAAJds/hu9Z4N7_8Ag/s512/IMG_0179.JPG after
Tim, who’s in charge of the tech department, lent me a bike to get around on. It’s a big help while we’re here in port.
June 13
I Helped TR with his project- renovating and organizing one of the deck lockers. Then I was given the job of cleaning up an old box corer. It’s a heavy metal device that’s dropped to the bottom and takes a large sediment sample. It’s very rusty. I learned how to use a needle gun to remove rust. The needle gun is a pneumatic tool with a bunch of quickly reciprocating rods that chip rust away very effectively. Rust busting is hard work, but actually pretty fun.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-SC04JN-cPCE/U7G6oz6xlpI/AAAAAAAAJgU/0JpFL9hThpM/s1200/_MG_5535.jpg Cleaning up part of the box corer.
The marina shop here is amazing. It’s a small warehouse with everything from a machine shop to a woodworking space. There’s a multi-story garage called the high bay with big doors and a 5-ton lift that can travel across the ceiling. Awesome place to work.
There was a beautiful lightning storm in the evening, I took some pictures from the bridge.
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-89u8WM2u_1g/U7G6ozlfBUI/AAAAAAAAJgc/xyBE3YMnVgc/s1200/_MG_5710.jpg Life is dangerous when you’re an osprey.
Weekend June 14/15
Saturday I slept late, relaxed, and did a little work. Sunday I was just getting ready to spend the day in town when Max showed up and took me to a cookout at Ted’s house. We played lawn games and grilled scallops that were frozen from the last cruise. They were delicious.
Applying, packing, and travel:
I guess I should start at the very beginning. I found the MATE internship program completely by chance. I recently built a simple ROV and was looking at MATE’s website to see if it qualified for the ROV contest. I noticed the internships tab and realized that it was a really unique opportunity. It offered serious time at sea doing real hands-on work on research vessels. And they pay you. And cover travel. Most comparable positions aren’t available to undergrads. Excited, I applied and hoped for the best.
MATE got back to me saying that I may be placed on Healy and Oceanus, then that I would be on University of Delaware’s R/V Hugh R. Sharp for a whole six weeks. I was ecstatic. Sharp would be conducting an annual survey of sea scallops to help set fishing regulations.
Most of my preparation consisted of paperwork and emails. MATE wants participants to enroll for credit, so I signed up for my home university’s summer internship course. Big mistake. It is not set up for this type of program, it’s more expensive than MPC’s, and it requires a whole lot of paperwork and homework- some of which is impossible for me to do at sea. By the time I realized what I got myself into, it was too late to drop it. Be careful what you sign up for!
Packing. It’s always hard to know how much to pack. MATE’s “what to bring” list, though helpful, seemed very normal and I felt like I would need more things. My mentor said I’d need steel-toe boots and foul weather gear, but the ship could buy them for me. I packed my sailing foulies and found some steel toed boots in the closet. I brought enough clothes for about two or three weeks on a ship, which is significantly less than one might need for the same amount of time on land. The Sharp has a laundry machine but I didn’t expect it to be usable all the time. I brought some bedding, toiletries, snacks, a flashlight, and my leatherman multitool. I charged up my camera and brought a wide lens, a long lens, and a bunch of other gear.
Where I live in New York isn’t that far from Sharp’s port in Delaware. I was sort of surprised that MATE decided to fly me there instead of using a train or bus. Whatever works! I weighed my bag on a scale to make sure it was under the airline’s 50lb limit and moved some stuff to my backpack.
June 6th 2014 – Adventure begins.
4am. My airport taxi got there early to bring me to my 6am flight. His headlights shined into my house from the inky night as I got my things together and scrambled downstairs. My flight went to North Carolina, then Salisbury, Maryland. I stayed in a hotel overnight and was picked up the next day along with another UNOLS technician.
I am headed out shortly for Oregon and the R\V Oceanus. I am honored to have been selected for this excellent opportunity. Tami and Nandita have been great getting me squared away and my host Toby at Oregon State University has been full of great information to prepare me for the internship. I am somewhat in awe of the resources put into making this opportunity happen. The emails have been flying as the folks at MATE, OSU and even the USCG have been coordniating my travel. I am very grateful for everyone’s efforts and will do my best to deserve the attention! In a couple of days I start a great learning advenure….can’t wait!
I forgot when I did my last blog post, but when we were working on the Oceanus, the NOAA ship the Tommy Thompson was tied up next to us. Lo and behold, on her fantail was the most famous ROV of all…JASON! My mentors know a bunch of people on the Thompson so we got to visit. I got to meet JASON’s crew and chat for a while. The supervisor gave me some good information about being an ROV Technician. For a budding ROV guy, it was pretty cool!
Only four days in to my internship and I have already completed two task that are the stock and trade for ROV Technicians (my future career): cable lubrication and cable termination. My mentor has me working on a great project to build a microcontroller operated spray wash system for the CTD cable as well. Tomorrow we depart for a 12 day mission to deply and recover geophysical devices. If I learn as much in the next 12 days as I have in the last four, my head will explode!
My first few days on the R/V Kilo Moana (KM) involved doing whatever was needed at the dock. First, I started helping the R/V Ka’imikai-O-Kanaloa (KOK) which was going to head out to sea the same day as the KM, but for very different reasons. It had been sitting at the dock for over a year recovering from some major engine problems. Now it was getting ready to do some sea trials to see if it was capable of lengthy cruises again. It had been awhile since the ship’s winches and wires were used so some of the techs from the KM and I helped do a pull test on the wire to calibrate the load cell (which measures wire tension). Since we were at the dock, we got creative with it and hooked up the wire to a giant forklift on dock. It looked like we were trying to tow the forklift into the water, but we were just using the weight of the forklift to put tension on the wire. We hooked up an external load cell to the system and gave the forklift a big tug. After calibrating the wire for several incremented tensions, we called it a day. We were lucky that at the very last minute we thought of putting a foot on the brake of the forklift before we started pulling or else there would have been a very expensive splash.
After helping the guys on the KOK I went back to my ship, the KM, and helped the German scientists load their equipment for their Manganese Nodule surveying cruise. This is a six week cruise and they have a lot of equipment that I’ve never seen before like a giant box core, a huge multi-core, a large camera sled, a big basket dredge, and a humungous epi-benthic sled. I’ll explain it all later in greater detail.
Before I knew it, we were cruising southwest in the direction of Mexico! The study area is 4-8 days cruising from Honolulu so we had plenty of time to kill. I spent the time watching over the other tech’s shoulders as I got acquainted with new systems on the Kilo Moana and recalled systems that look similar to what I was used to on the Thompson. I also did my research on what makes the Kilo Moana unique: its Small Water Plane Twin Hull (SWATH) design, which makes for a really steady ride. Even in rougher sea states, it just feels like you’re on a subway with minor jerks and twists.
The transit went by really fast. We started off with a camera sled. This is absolutely new to me, so I stood back and watched for the first deployment and recovery. As we did it more and more I started helping out a little more, with handling lines and deck equipment. The main reason I didn’t jump right in is because this ship operates completely differently than the Thompson, so I made sure I understood the role of the marine tech very well. My mentors, Steve and Rob, explained to me that the Kilo Moana uses different hand signals for the crane, that you need explicit permission from the bridge before starting any operation, and most importantly that the marine tech is in charge of all deployments and recoveries of science equipment. This is different from the Thompson where the marine tech was only in charge of CTD deployments and recoveries. So, after a few days I was starting to ‘learning the ropes’ of the Kilo Moana deck operations, and once I started to feel comfortable enough to start being more involved, everything starts going downhill.
Not even a week into science operations on this six week cruise, one of our AB’s has a medical emergency and we have to go all the way back to Hawaii to drop him off. This is unfortunate for so many reasons, but the lesson learned is that there is no predicting what will happen out at sea. As a marine tech, scientist or crew member, we need to be prepared for absolutely everything.
The next day was my birthday, and the cooks made me a really nice birthday cheesecake and I opened a few birthday cards that my family had given me before I left in January. The crew was nice enough not to embarrass me by singing to me. I also got an extra hour of sleep, because we were heading west, towards Hawaii, and that was the best birthday present I’ve ever received. My first birthday at sea was a happy one and it improved morale a little bit, after learning that we were losing 8 days of science due to this medevac.
It took us four days to get back to the closest Hawaiian port, Hilo. One interesting thing about this port call was that we were one crew member short, so I was enlisted to fill the vacancy. This meant that I was helping with the docking procedure which included throwing the mooring lines to the guys on the dock, pulling it tight with a capstan and fastening the line to the bits on the deck. Then I helped with craning the gangway in place. It sounds simple enough, but when we’re dealing with tying down a 186’ long hunk of floating steel, it can be intense. The mooring lines are as thick as my arm and are pulled to very high tensions. There is no room for error as it can get dangerous very quickly.
After we tied down the ship and put the gangway across, we had another mission: refueling. Since we added a lot more cruising than we originally planned, we figured we might run out of fuel before we get back, so we had to get ready to take on fuel. My involvement in this was to help lay out the fuel boom around the ship to contain any spilt fuel and prevent an environmental disaster if a leak occurred during the refueling process. It was pretty straightforward; we had a small boat circle the ship while towing the boom.
A few short hours past, we performed the medevac, loaded some supplies from one of UH’s small supply ships, finished refueling, and started heading back out to the next study area which was eight days away! I got to help out again as we left the dock, but once we were underway, it was a waiting game.
Altogether, this medevac cost us eight days of science, and thanks to the great administration of UH, they were able to extend the cruise from six weeks to seven weeks for the scientists. So they will get to do most of the science they had planned.
We kept busy by maintaining the underway science systems. Steve showed me how to set up the meteorological data collection, start logging the multibeam bathymetry, and we put out a magnetometer to record the magnetic signature of the seafloor. These were all especially important, because we were going across an area where there is very sparse magnetics, bathymetric and meteorological data.
This transit did not go without its own problems, though. First, our multibeam bathymetry system underwent a routine hardware self-test and came back with a failure. Something was wrong with one of the boards in the giant rack of processing computers. We tried replacing it and it went dead! Nothing else we could do about that.
Second, our magnetometer stopped working, so we reeled it in and it came back with several deep shark bites. It bit through the Overhauser sensor and when we went to take the case off of the magnetometer it started spewing out methanol which was an indication that the sensor had been ruined. A little bit of methanol got in my mouth and, being a hypochondriac, I immediately emailed my mommy and went to the ship’s doctor. It turns out that I’ll be fine, but the magnetometer is down for the count.
Third, the Kilo Moana is brilliantly designed in a lot of different ways, except one. Every time you need to switch which type of wire is going through the block on the A-Frame, you need to cut the end off so it’ll fit and then reterminate the wire. This is time consuming, but it gives me a lot of opportunity to watch and practice the termination methods. So far I’ve gotten experience with feige fittings for trawl wire, normal serial feed conductors in .322 and .680 wires, and even learned how to terminate fiber cables for the .681 wire.
When it comes to winches and wires and cables, I’ve gotten a lot of experience troubleshooting and learning from user error in the past four months. Unfortunately, the best way to learn about something, in depth, is to have it break or be misused and have to fix it.
During the transit back to the study area, we were spooling on the .681 wire so we could spool out the trawl wire for the next operation. This involves passing it through the deck of the 02 level where the spool is, having it enter the winch room, run through the traction winch a couple of times, then out across the main deck and through three massive blocks in the A-Frame. There is no line of site to keep an eye on every part of the wire during this procedure, so good communication is necessary to do it safely and effectively and avoid having the wire bunch up in any one section.
So, as we were attempting to spool the trawl wire, we noticed that the controls weren’t moving the traction winch. We kept pushing the lever out more and more to see if it just needed some more juice, but no reply. Meanwhile, nobody was up on the 02 deck and we didn’t know what was going on up there. So it turns out that only the spool on the 02 deck was turning because we hadn’t had a switch in the right place. Once we realized that we were probably spooling out wire on the 02 deck we ran up to the trawl wire spool and realized we had bird-caged it. If you’ve ever gone fishing, you know this is one of the worst things that can happen to a spool of wire. It took us all afternoon in the blazing sun to correct this mishap.
Currently we are in the dark about another problem that seems to have fixed itself. We were going about our daily business and all of a sudden we went to start up the winch for an operation and it showed no ‘proof of tension’. What this means is that the traction winch (the middle man between the spool and the load hanging off the ship) is feeling the weight of the load, but not feeling the pull of the storage drum. In order for the traction winch to do its job, it needs to have tension on both sides, and the ‘proof of tension’ light is indicative of having the proper amount of tension to operate. Therefore, when the light doesn’t come on, it means that either the storage drum’s hydraulics is damaged or that there is an electrical issue.
As I said, this problem seems to have fixed itself, and what I mean by that is that it suddenly started working after poking the relay switches in a junction box. Lucky as we may be, we are still very cautious about having it happen again. The current orders are to leave it running at all times since restarting the hydraulics seems to have done something to have triggered the problem with the proof of tension. We suspect it was an electrical problem. However, in the scheme of things, science equipment failure isn’t the worst thing that can happen out here.
In this case we are thousands of miles from the closest civilization, and there is nothing out here except that what we took with us. We are further from civilization than the astronauts on the International Space Station. It is a very sobering fact to be at the mercy of the giant unforgiving ocean and it’s a fact that we all must come to live with. In the case of a nearby Chinese fishing vessel, they lost everything that they brought with them in a fire that ended up sinking their ship, stranding them on a life raft in the middle of this endless oceanic abyss. Since we were the closest vessel to them, and we happen to have a medical doctor on board, we were called by the coast guard to go attend to their burn victims and drop them off in Mexico. This would have been the end of our cruise all together as it would have taken weeks to do this. Somehow, we lucked out of this operation when the Air Force took over the rescue operation by flying a helicopter over 1000 miles to save them. That is an amazing feat for a helicopter and it was a risky operation, but they succeeded. We were only on this mission for a couple of hours before we got called off, but I am really glad we didn’t have to deal with another traumatic medical emergency. I am now even more aware of the reality of the danger of working at sea in the middle of nowhere.
The coup de grâce to all of the mess that has happened on this now seven week German cruise so far came in the form of sewage water flooding all of the heads on the lower two levels of the ship. Straight out of a nightmare; somebody came out of a bathroom screaming that there was sewage everywhere. Lo’ and behold, the engineers had flushed the sewage in reverse, which means that instead of flushing the sewage overboard, they flushed it, with the speed of a fire hose, up into the plumbing of the ship and out the toilets. The result: four inches deep of toxic sewage water in the heads of some of our staterooms and all of the public heads. It was sloshing around with the roll of the ship, spilt over into the carpets in the staterooms, got into the walls, trickled down the hallways, was tracked around by people walking through it, and dripped down the ladders.
Science stopped once again. The mission was cleaning up the ship and making it livable again. Since no science was happening, I pitched in, doing my duty as a member of the ship, I donned a full-body Tivex suit, latex gloves and booties and started cleaning an epic mess. We used shop vacs to suck out the sewage water from the heads and dumped it overboard. There was an actual bucket brigade of sewage water going through the ship. Talk about building camaraderie.
After a few hours of doing this, and spreading as much bleach as possible, I was recruited to go help the chief engineer down in the pump room with removing the old pump and replacing it with a new one. This pump was extremely heavy and there was also sewage sloshing around down in this room, so I was slipping and sliding all over the place. Eventually we got it replaced and I went outside to get out of my Tivex suit. I think I had lost about five pounds through sweating, but I think I earned a little more respect from the crew.
The lasting effects of this spill were that we had to rip up a lot of carpet and basically keep an eye out for more sewage that might be seeping out of the walls. Our staterooms were a biohazard site during the day, but after hours of bleaching and cleaning we felt somewhat comfortable sleeping in there. Thankfully, the rooms will be professionally cleaned and the walls will be taken out and cleaned once we get back to port, but unfortunately this incident occurred before the halfway point of our seven week cruise.
After all of these setbacks, I think I am starting to get a real understanding of the pros and cons of working on a ship. There are a lot of different perspectives that people can take about stories like the ones in this blog, but I’m observing that these extreme situations definitely can bring out the best in some people and if not, it definitely builds character. I’m still loving what I do, every day!
Well, as they say, all good things must come to an end. After dropping off the MoorSPICE scientists in New Caledonia, we embarked on my final voyage on the R/V Thomas G. Thompson. It was a short transit to Auckland, New Zealand. I had very few marine tech tasks to do as I was mostly planning my six day vacation in New Zealand and tying up some loose ends.
One of the loose ends was a table I had to build out of basically whatever scraps I could find. This table was for the next cruise which was a 40 day cruise with the ROV Nereus. They wanted a table with a sink so they could wash and strain their sediment cores without getting the deck full of silt.
The building of this table is actually a pretty funny story. After spending days scrounging up some sturdy legs and cutting a sink hole in a piece of plywood I went to paint it. I was painting it outside on the back deck, and it was getting late, so a colleague told me to put it downstairs in the hot winch room because it would dry quicker. After a few more coats of paint the next day I put all of the pieces together.
Then I realized it needed some support in order to withstand heavy use on the back deck, so I enlisted some help from engineers and found some plywood to screw in as supports. After hours of hard labor in the hot winch room it was time to take it upstairs to the now chilly air blowing hard on the back deck, and… wait. It’s way too big to fit through the door! Ahhh!
After taking it all apart and putting it back together on the back deck it was time for bed again. I finished it the next day with a water-tight caulked sink and furnished a way to bolt it to the deck. The next morning I woke up and the Nereus guys were already onboard and thanked me graciously for building this table out of the very little materials on board.
So, we had docked in the middle of the night and I spent the morning cleaning my room. After clearing customs I was whisked away off the ship by my friends Damien, Troy, and Tina who were also at the end of their hitches on the Thompson. A cab awaited us and we drove to our hostel in downtown Auckland.
After spending a lifetime total of four and a half months living on the big hunk of steel that they call the R/V Thompson G. Thompson, I was sad to walk away from it. I barely got a chance to give people hugs as I was leaving, but I knew we would all keep in touch via Facebook. My memories and everything I learned on the Thompson will never be forgotten.
Nostalgic as I was feeling, I also was extremely drained and practically burnt out. I had worked 84 hours per week for over 13 weeks straight! Sometimes I felt ambitious and worked more than 12 hours per day and some days I just felt as though sleep was way more important. Either way, my mind and body needed a break.
The wonderful people at MATE were nice enough to give me six days to myself in New Zealand! I did not waste it. The very same day I got off the ship, I also jumped off the Auckland Bridge twice with the 3rd mate Damien. This was the first time bungy jumping for both of us and we absolutely loved it! It was the same place where the inventor of bungy jumping first jumped. Later we cheered on the Iron Man competition that was going on in the streets of Auckland and headed to our hostel for an early restful evening.
After one night in Auckland, Damien, the third engineer, Troy and I all hopped on a bus and went to a small town south of Auckland where we would start hiking the Tongariro Crossing. It is involves hiking up and across Mount Ngauruhoe which is better known as Mount Doom from Lord of the Rings! This is arguably the most famous hike in New Zealand as it gets over 1500 hikers per day on a 7 mile trail in peak season. However the day we went was not ideal for hiking, so we saw very few people. The winds at the top of the mountain were 40-50mph and the wind chill was near freezing. It was quite a challenge considering I had spent the last few months living on the equator! Our only hope of things warming up was the volcano erupting beneath us which happened as recently as last year! Thankfully, it did not erupt and we survived the cold.
After a long and challenging day of hiking I said goodbye to Damien and Troy and headed back to Auckland alone; they were continuing south on a month-long vacation in New Zealand. After a crashing for a day in Auckland, I got out and explored the city.
Some friends I made at the hostel and I went to Viaduct Harbor to watch Prince William and Princess Kate race each other on authentic “American Cup” sailboats. These racing sailboats are more expensive than the R/V Thomas G. Thompson, and have a lot of history, but the thousands of people that showed up were not there for the boats. Everyone went crazy after waiting for hours just to see these people sail by for a few seconds on their way out into the bay. It was a huge event.
The following days were lazy for me as I tried to unwind. However my 3 roommates egged me onto another hike that took us through the giant parks in Auckland and up to Mount Eden which had a fantastic view of the city. From there we could see the harbor, the surrounding towns, some small islands in the distance, mountain ranges and the skyline of Auckland. Then we spent the evening at Mission Bay swimming under an orange and pink sunset.
The last night I was in New Zealand, I went to some bars with some people from the hostel and we ran into three crew members from the R/V Thomas G. Thompson! After dancing and chatting for a while we said our final goodbyes as they were leaving in the morning and so was I.
The next morning I bid farewell to Auckland and all of my new friends. Before I knew it, after a short bus ride to the airport, I was asleep on an airplane to Fiji. After arriving in Fiji, my connecting flight to Hawaii was delayed. I ended up staying eight hours in a hot Fijian airport, but it gave me ample time to organize the heaps of photos I’ve taken on the Thompson and relive all of the great memories.
After the plane touched down in Hawaii I gave a quick phone call to my loved ones for the first time in three months and then a short cab ride to Snug Harbor where I meet Scott Ferguson, the manager of the marine technicians at the University of Hawaii. He gives me a quick tour of the Kilo Moana, shows me my room and lets me get acquainted with my new home.
My first impression of the Kilo Moana is that it’s 100 feet shorter than the Thompson, but after getting on it, I realized that it was almost twice as wide as my previous ship. My stateroom is impressive. It is carpeted, has a small television for viewing deck operations, and most of all: It has a Window!
I expect that it will take me some time to get used to this new ship. Changing ships is like changing families, if you can imagine that. It has a different atmosphere all together, but nothing to be worried about. I feel like this ship will spoil me with interesting stories and plenty of smart brains to pick. My first cruise is the longest cruise I’ve had to date, 43 days. Let’s hope it doesn’t take me that long to get acclimated to my new home.
Well if you read my last blog entry http://www.marinetech.org/internship-blog/bid/1100 then you know that the MoorSPICE cruise started off without a hitch! However, as I am learning about life at sea, nothing goes exactly as planned and everyone needs to be prepared for anything.
Some of the troubles we encountered since the last post were minor like the less-than-salty scientists getting seasick and disappearing into their rooms for days. Another problem was that some scientists couldn’t get sleep because their beds are near the bow thruster which was pounding away all day and all night on this cruise, but these were minor personal problems.
We did encounter a few technical problems which spanned from leaky bottles to haunted water sample processing equipment. First, there were several Niskin bottles that boggled the techs. When we send down the CTD, we send it down on a strong metal cable that has a few metal wires in it that transfer data up to the ship and commands down to the instrument. The commands are to close the caps to the bottles which captures a water sample at a certain depth. Now in order for this to work properly it needs to be sealed water tight. In a growing number of cases on this trip, there were bottles that were coming up warm; water from the deep ocean should be very cold so this was indicative of a leak. Oh, and another clue was the fact that it was visually leaking. We discovered that the culprit was a crack in the bottles and we had to replace a few of them. Problem solved, but not all problems were this easy to solve.
A bigger problem occurred during a day that we set aside to download data from a mooring, remotely. One of the engineers from Scripps, Spencer, was tasked with using a sonar transducer to ‘talk’ with a mooring that was anchored to the seafloor right under the ship. He then used the transducer to command it to send us data via sound waves so our sonar receiver could download it. However the data never came. We tried using his personal sonar transducer and then the ship’s transducer, but neither of them worked. Luckily we were able to download data from a second mooring in the area. We called it a success and cruised to the next station.
The biggest problem for this cruise was the salinometer. Not only was it the biggest problem, but the challenge to solve the problem was put squarely on my shoulders. Now if you know anything about salinometers, which you don’t, you know that they’re incredibly touchy, they work only every other lunar eclipse, and they’re susceptible to all sorts of voodoo, but when you finally understand their ways, they give you the most accurate data you could ever need. Some people know them very well, but nobody on this cruise was one of them. So I got out the manual and hacked away at the beast until I figured out how to calibrate the thing to standardized sea water (sea water from off the coast of England that costs ~$120/liter) and how to properly clean the thing between each testing sample. The problem was that the data that it was producing was just wrong; it was way too high to be real. So I reread the manual over and over and for a couple of days I am completely stuck. Then I realized that there was a dial to manually adjust the voltage associated with the specific salinity in the standardized seawater, I guess because I’m a millennial I had assumed it was automatic. Then after helping the scientists with their calculations, we finally got some numbers that made sense! Not the quickest fix, but a fix nonetheless.
Another big problem at sea is monotony. The work is exciting and intensity is high, but the routine is, well, very routine. After doing moorings and CTD’s for a couple of months straight I kind of needed something to break up the routine a little bit.
The first thing I do is talk with the scientists and the other techs and bug them to tell me everything they know. I would go to Mar, the biologist from Spain, and try to get into the mind of a scientist. It is important to remember that the ship’s crew and the scientists come from very different backgrounds and are on the ship for very different reasons. The marine tech is responsible for keeping everybody on the same page and making sure everybody gets what they want out of the cruise, safely.
Another scientist I talked to was Marion from Scripps, who taught me everything there is to know about the Lower Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler and the software that she uses to read and process the data. It’s also important to know how the scientists use the data that we’re going to such great extents to collect. If they’re not happy with the data, they’re not happy with the cruise. Data is the driving force behind all science.
Helping me understand the data and much much more about the ship’s computers was Patrick A’Hearn, the lead marine tech on this cruise. He took me to the racks of computers in the computer lab and described to me in great detail over the course of weeks, what each machine does. I took it upon myself to draw it out in a formal network diagram, but the network is so complicated that it would leave the reader more confused. He and Tina taught me a lot about what types of data goes between what types of computers and it is a lot to process, but in this age of automation, so so important.
Aside from filling my head with information, I also like to fill my belly. On March 14th, the third mate, Marion, and another scientist, Sri, all stayed up through the night to bake all sorts of pies for Pi Day! I’m admittedly not that great of a cook, especially on little sleep, but we made enough pies to last for days. Luckily that night the cooks set up a barbeque on the bow. It was really neat to enjoy our creations with the beautiful Gizo Island almost a stone’s throw away. Since all of these islands are scarcely inhabited, it was incredibly unique that we saw two people rowing a canoe out in the shallow reefs around us. Then to top it off, we had a beautiful sunset. What a Pi Day.
More from the battlefront against monotony: The 2014 MoorSPICE Ping Pong Extravaganza! We had a lot of time to kill during a few 30 hour transits, so the chief scientist enlisted me to set up a tournament to keep everyone busy and our spirits high. With the help of an exceptional AB, Pam, we set up a ‘random selector’ machine to pick opponents for the first round of the tournament. This was a lesson in mechanical engineering as we built an actual lottery machine with floating ping pong balls with numbers on them. It was quite the thrill and I have gotten really good at ping pong over the past few months, so I kicked butt.
Another recreational activity we did to pass time was fishing, and as a group we caught one fish. It was about two feet long, and it was something called a blue runner. We saw a whole bunch of fish and even a shark way out in the ocean, but we only got one. I lie, we also had a flying fish fly on deck and dry out on us, although that wasn’t nearly as appetizing.
The biggest recreational project we had was the CTD videography. We wanted to show people at home what we do on a daily basis, and we also wanted to see what it looks like when the CTD descends down into the deep dark blue depths of the Ocean. So before we got the CTD in the water, we taped a GoPro to the end of a 20’ pole and held it in the water over the side of the ship. After we recorded the CTD deploying, we brought the GoPro inside and made a timelapse video of the usually four to six hours of watching numbers on a screen to make sure everything is working. This turned out great and I hope to post it somewhere and put the link here.
All and all, the MoorSPICE cruise was pretty awesome. I had a lot of fun and learned a lot of French from some of the foreign scientists. If you’d like to know more about the science, they made their own blog here http://moorspice2014.wordpress.com/ .
As for me, after a short stay in the New Caledonian port which included a long hot day of unloading all of their mooring stuff followed shortly by a well-deserved pool party, I was nearing the end of my hitch on the Thompson. I cannot even imagine being on another ship, but after a short transit to Auckland, New Zealand, I’m getting right on a plane and heading to Hawaii to get on the Kilo Moana!