It’s Week Two. Yes the second week has ended and this one snuck up on me. We keep to a steady schedule of getting out of bed at five, prepping the sub and trying to get it out on deck around seven fifteen, and in the water by eight. This means we all need to on our game to get our task done the right way wile being the most efficient. Sadly this means finding time for pictures of the prep, rollout, and launch can get difficult. Now have no fear I have some pictures of all the other work I’ve been doing.
Now I believe I left off on last Tuesday with describing my struggles of finally getting the network figured out. So were on to Wednesday. Wednesday was s bit of a late start for various reasons we did not get into the water till eleven o’clock. The camera crew that I had briefly mention before had bee for a show on Vice. Now I never caught what the show was called and any other information for that matter. It was very strait forward, here is the sub, here is how it works, and then they got to go down for a ride and look around. Do to the work I was doing at the time I didn’t really see them too much. The Vice crew had there own vessel that they would return to at the end of the day and by Thursday they were gone.
Thursday, well Thursday is the day when the weather changed from sunshine and smooth waters to rain, rain, and more rain. It really wasn’t that bad because the storms didn’t last long enough to produce large waves. I started a new side project were I had to rebilled the thermal couples on the sub’s ICLs (inductively coupled link). An ICL interface allows for a non-contact serial communication with an instrument via a pulsed AC magnetic filed. This allows the sub to use different interchangeable tools on one arm and not have to worry about wires.
Friday was a little more interesting. The sub went into the water at its normal time and I continued work on the thermal couples. In all it went according to plain until it was time to pule the sub out of the water. We had a visitor land on the walkway we use to get people in and out of the sub wile it was on deck. At the time we didn’t think anything of it, birds land on the ship all the time so it was nothing new. So after a wile we are finally bringing the sub in and this bird had not left yet. Well we tried everything short of pushing the bird off the walkway and it still wouldn’t leave. Lone behold it wasn’t until we got everyone out of the sub when this bird decided stop standing in the middle of the walkway and flew off.
Saturday was a great contrast to Friday because it didn’t stop raining. It was raining when we put the sub in and was raining wile we took it out. There were no problems with the sub and spent most of my work time that day soaked to the bone. The one thing that was interesting was the thunderstorms that night. Lightning rarely touches down out at sea so most of what we were seeing would branch across from one end of the sky to the other.
Lastly it is today, Sunday. The day started off like all the others, wakening up at five and getting the sub into the water. The weather finally started to clear up and the day was going well. Then around One
O-clock a pod of dolphins came by the ship. There had to be at least one hundred of them. They were chasing down a school of fish and just so happened to pass by the ship. It had happen so fast that it was over before most of the crew new what was happening. When it came time to bring the sub up it had begun to rain again and once it was on deck we got it into the hanger as quick as possible and unloaded the passengers from there. In all the day went really well, other then getting bogged down with work for the sub tonight I have been in a pretty regular schedule the last two weeks.
I am going to try to leave more photos this time and I noticed that my last photo didn’t scale properly for my posting. I don’t know it if the case for everyone but if it continues to happen you can view the photo by right clicking and going to view image. I am trying to figure it out.