Working on a ship is definitely not always adventure, fun, and cool science. There are things to get accustomed to that can’t be accounted for no matter how carefully you plan your life. There are events that can conspire to tear apart the very fabric of your day to day reality. When every day is exactly like the last one, and you are on night shift, so you never really see day light time takes on a whole new meaning. Days aren’t days, time skews in a direction that is fundamentally inconsequential and frankly days get lost. I lost three total days quite literally. I thought it was Sunday when in fact it was Wednesday. I have never had this happen quite so fully. We all experience the waking up and thinking it is one day but it is in fact another. But this past two weeks has literally been Ground hog day for me every day. I awoke generally a couple hours before sunset, so mentally I wasn’t quite awake until after the sun went down.  I had been getting maybe 4 hours of sleep a night on a GREAT night. So by the end of two weeks I was run down, a little irritable, and completely not mentally on my A game anymore.

We unloaded the last science cruise, I finally got to do some laundry, then we began loading the next cruise just under 2 hours after we had finished re-arranging the deck for the next cruise. So between being sleep deprived for two weeks, standing in for a deck hand, helping pass countless large instruments across to a dock because we have no gangway, making sure the science party had all their things, then helping load on GIANT frames for acoustic devices, getting thrown around like a rag doll because they asked me to stand on one of the frame legs while it was raised into the air via a crane, waking up this morning to a torrential down pour in which we got underway, it had been a long few weeks. My mind is mush, my body aches, and I don’t know what day of the week it is because all the clocks on this ship read different days. It is a small boat, and impossible to get any alone time. So I spent the entire day in my bunk sleeping after we got underway. 

But on the bright side I am learning about how the ADCP works, which is a fascinating piece of equipment that is constantly running in the background. It is one of the many pieces of equipment that the Marine tech must keep functioning at all times. ADCP stands for Accoustic Doppler Current Profiler. As I am sure most of you know the Doppler effect is how the pitch of a sound changes when an object if moving toward you or away from you. It is the same thing old school police radar used, and what the weather man uses in order to show you groovy cloud formations moving over your area and bringing you either happy rain or beautiful sunny days. Well the ADCP sends out a sound pulse and uses what are called scatterers that bounce back the sound in order to determine which way the current is going. Typical scatterers are Euphasiids, pteropods, and copepods to name a few. These planktonic creatures are fairly well distributed in a given water column. The typical ADCP unit has 4 transducers that is oriented in a specific way in relation to the ship. By knowing the orientation of these transducers, along with the use of our various navigation systems of which GPS is a component we are able to deduce the rate of flow of the current, it’s direction, and it’s depth.

At first thought the ADCP doesn’t sound like it would be a piece of equipment that needs to be run all the time, but you have to remember our ships are meant to be able to stay in one location very precisely in order to deploy various equipment. So we must be able to compensate for the current that is at the surface affecting the ship, as well as the currents at depth where the instrumentation may be experiencing different forces. So this is just one of the many behind the scenes pieces of equipment that without our job would be nearly impossible. Next week I think I will tell you about the POS/MV which stands for Position and Orientation System for Marine Vessels. This piece of equipment is very intricate and EXTREMELY important in day to day functioning.