04/07/16
Holiday at Sea
Happy 4th of July from the USCGC Healy! Today marks day 3 on our expedition to the Arctic and things have been going smoothly. We have been sailing southwest along the Aleutian Trench since the day before yesterday and I anticipate we will make a right turn into the Bering Sea sometime in the next day or so. Since today is the 4th there are a few activities scheduled: the crew will kick off a cornhole tournament (possibly ping pong) and there will be some sort of “pyrotechnic training”. There is also a USA themed movie marathon on the ship’s tv channel.
Since getting on board, I have slowly been able to find my way around the ship both physically and on the various networks we have here. Step one was finding the route(s) between the computer lab, stateroom, and mess deck. From there I could begin mounting troubleshooting strategies for the various instruments we have here.
Much of the work we have done so far is to make sure that these instruments are sending accurate data to the right place. If you want a visualization any of these, they are usually a black cylinder with various tubes and plugs leading in and out. Yesterday I checked that the fluorometers (which measure how much chlorophyll is in the water) were calibrated and sending that data to the right port on the network. I later checked to make sure the configuration file for the computer that runs the instruments on the CTD (a water sampler that also measures conductivity, temperature, and depth) was set up so that the serial numbers matched. And the day before we left Seward my mentor, Croy, had me change a gyro on the gravimeter in the bottom of the ship. I worked very carefully since it was one of the more sensitive (and expensive!) instruments on board. It made a full recovery with its new gyro. You don’t often get to work with the guts of a gravity meter.
I’m learning alot obout the serial interfaces between instruments and computers as well as the myriad software that parse the data. Day to day duties involve looking at all the various fires and then trying to put them out, which keeps things constantly changing.
This also reminds me: We had our first actual fire alarm yesterday! Nothing major, but since it was a few hours after the first drill it caught a few by suprise.
Perhaps next week I’ll be able to say that everything is running perfectly. However I’m dubious, plus we will be at our first station by then so I’ll have some updates.
Until then,
Nick
Photo cred: Croy Carlin of the OSU Martech group