My adventure started last Tuesday. I had to fly from my parents place in Virginia to Atlanta and then on to Costa Rica. I was able to meat another member of the Alvin team in Atlanta. Hue has been working at WHOI for a long time now but has not worked with Alvin to often during his time there. When we got into San Jose I got to meat Mike, one of the Alvin pilots. Mike has been doing this for a wile and has had the opportunity to dive on numerous locations. One very notably of which was the Titanic. There were several people flying in that night so instead of leaving for the port everybody stayed at the local Days Inn. The fallowing morning we drove two hours to Puntarenas. Then we took the 12:00 ride over to the Atlantis. The Atlantis had been out at anchor because the tides and swells were so strong that it would lead to issues wile in port. Once I was aboard all the introductions began and I got to have a tour of the ship. Once that was done I got to meat the rest of the Alvin group, Pat, Todd, Josh, Drew, Jason, and Danik.
Thursday was workday, the Alvin team had to get the sub completely ready for operations. For me this meant that I would be working with the ET shop. I had to be checking the different cameras and making sure everything was set up correctly. Friday Started out with a weight party. A weight party is when you wake up and report on deck at 5:00am to setup the weights for all the cruses. We had to make 82 stacks and each stack had 16 weights. Each weight ways 16 pounds so there is 256 pounds per stack. In the end we moved 20,992 pounds of steal weights. The science group came aboard that day and started to setup all of their equipment. Some of the bigger items we had to go into port to get. As Saturday came around we left the bay at 9:00 and transited for 10 hours to our dive location. Once there we got the elevator set up and dropped it for the dive on Sunday. The elevator is a platform that is sent down with samples attached to it so the sub can place them and recover old samples that were left on pervious dives. Finally Sunday was our first dive day and it went well. I had gotten a run down of jobs I had to complete in order for the sub to get in the water on time. Then when the sub was in the water we prepped for its return and went on to do side projects. I started work on the batteries one of the battery packs had been swapped out and needed work done. The sub was out of the water by 5:00 and then began the post dive operations.
Now I was intending to send out a post that night saying look guys its week one and we just did our first dive. As you can tell it didn’t go according to plan. Internet wasn’t working out to well. There are two more groups that are working on this ship with Alvin. Sentry, which is a UAV (underwater autonomous vehicle) and Wire Flyer, which is a autonomous bot that operates by moving up and down a wire that towed at deep depths. That doesn’t include the science group that is working with Alvin. Every one of these groups needs to be utilizing the network so it has become very limited. We have had two more dives sense Sunday, one on Monday and one today. They went off like clockwork with just your typical post dive maintenance. I have finished my work on the batteries and have moved on to a couple different projects. Things have been going well and there even was a film crew that came out today. I didn’t see much of them but apparently they have a dived schedule for tomorrow.
I’m going to try and post every Sunday in order to recap on the week before. I also will post a picture with me in it next time.