03/08/16
Blog 6- Moorings and Transit
Today marks the last day of standard science operations. Having finished the last ROV dive yesterday we only had moorings to do today. Moorings consist of instruments attached along a steel cable with a weight on the bottom and floats on top, which keep the entire assembly upright. The Board of Lies was true to its name: listing arrival on station at 0700 and start of mooring operations at 0800, where in actuality nothing happened until well after 1400.
But even after an interesting morning (playing Monopoly Coast Guard Edition with some of the crew) the recovery and deployments of two of three moorings went off without a hitch. Unfortunately one of the moorings never responded to our pings so it wasnt recovered. This was only a small dissapointment in the scope of the last week of otherwise successful science ops.
Before moorings, scientists and crew had been working in the nonstop cycle of daytime ROV deployment, box coring, CTD casts, and multinet sampling. On one of the last dives I decided to check out the ROV control van (aka shipping container) since I had not seen the inside yet.
Luckily for me, I stayed long enough to watch the end of the dive and was invited to drive the ROV on the way up from the seafloor! The controls were reminiscent of a video game in that your hands were on a joystick and a lever, and your inputs could be seen with the on-screen attitude display. The constant feeling that your slightest movement would precisely move a very expensive VW Beetle sized submarine located at the end of a 900 m (~3000ft) cable was quite remarkable.
We have now been sailing south towards the Bering Strait for about a day and have rounded Cape Lisbourne, and the ship is properly pitching and rolling now that we have left the ice. And since today is the 226th birthday of the United States Coast Guard we took advantage of the sunny and 40F weather to have a birthday barbecue on the flight deck. Even though there are no science operations, a lot of undoing the scientists’ set ups and packing samples will happen over the next few days so we are prepared for offload in Seward.
Photo thanks to Stuart Ireland
