R/V Marcus G. Langseth,
25-June-13, Vigo, Spain
R/V Marcus G. Langseth: BREAKing News
Well, I thought that I was going to write about what life is like on a boat for this blog post, but the past few days have been interesting. A few days ago, our port side engine broken down. We were forced to bring in all of the guns, and streamers, and head to port to get it fixed. As I am writing this, we just pulled into the port in Vigo, Spain. This does not mean that there isn’t work to do, but it is a bit of a change of pace from being out on the ocean.
The day the engine broke started out like any other day, but at about 2:00 am, we all noticed a strange rumbling sound and then just as suddenly, it started to fade away. As it faded though it kept getting quieter and quieter. Soon it was nearly dead silent. One of the engines had gone out. This was bad as we couldn’t maintain our speed to keep the streamers and guns trailing behind us for very long with one engine. The engineers quickly went to check the scene, but were dismayed to find that it was a major problem. The call went out to pull everything in.
I quickly grabbed my harness, a hard hat, and a float coat and rushed up to the gun deck to meet Robbie and Carlos (the gun mechanics on my shift) to help them take out the guns. We immediately began our work. Carlos and I hooked up our monkey tails and undid the safety net while Robbie began to pull in the gun strings. Once the gun string got close, it was only a matter of time before we finally had all of the guns on deck. We did a little bit of maintenance, while we waited for the streamer team to assemble.
Once assembled, I then went up to the streamer deck and began to lend a hand bringing in the streamer. After about 5 minutes working with the streamer crew, Robbie and Carlos called me up to the vein deck to help them bring in the door. Thus, I ran up one more deck and began to help them bring in the door. We were about half way to bringing in the door, it is out about 500 meters from the boat, when the waves picked up and so we weren’t able to bring the door the rest of the way in. Luckily though, we had brought it in enough so that we could bring up the streamers.
I went back down to the streamer deck and helped in any way I could. Each member of the group was assigned a task. Mine was to help take off the birds and SSRDs and once removed, I was to go and disassemble them and place them in their holders. We were bringing up two streamers simultaneously and so I was busily running back and forth between streamers taking off birds and SSRDs and disassembling them.
Just before my shift ended, the seas calmed enough to bring the door on so I went and helped bring in the door. My job was to use a large hook on the end of a rope to hook a giant metal ring on the door. Imagine one of those carnival games where you try to hook a duck on a fishing pole and expand the length to about 25 feet and the weight of the hook to 10 pounds and you have my job. After numerous attempts though, I finally managed to hook the ring and we could bring up the door. With the door brought in my shift was done and I could go to bed.
When I woke up the next day the rest of the streamers had been brought in and the other door as well. We were also on our way towards Vigo, Spain to meet an engineer who could possible fix our broken engine. I learned that the head of the engine had cracked, water and oil were mixed throughout the engine, and one of the pistons was messed up. It might take a long time to get fixed once we finally get into Vigo, but were hopeful that all will go well and we will be out in the ocean soon.
Take care everyone.
– This is Tyler Poppenwimer, signing off –