I went into the transducer well to clean up all the leftover adhesives and grind everything down so we would have a good clean surface to remount the transducers. I used a weir wheel to clean up all the mounting bolts for it as well.
We are using one of the university’s vans while we are here so we can get around to get supplies as we need them. The van hadn’t been starting all the time but we were able to jump it. It would have this problem about half the time, but then other times it would be fine. I decided to see if I could fix it. I used a multimeter to run some tests and I narrowed the problem down to a bad alternator. There was a NAPA close by but by this time the van got worse and could not even stay running at this point. So I took a bicycle to the store and picked up a new alternator. I installed it that night and the van has been great since.
We have also had problems with our air conditioning on the ship this week. It stopped working all together at one point. Normally when we are in the water we just pump the sea water right from the hull and through the AC system but because we are up high out of the water we have to have hoses run up from the ocean and water is pumped up to the ship. We have to match the water pump’s pressure with the ship’s AC pump. Too much pressure and the pipe could rupture, and not enough it could burn out our pump. We had pressure but not too much but the system was still not working and pipe connections were starting to fail and leake. We ended up checking the whole system and found down below off the ship the outlet hose had become kinked which was putting a ton of back pressure on the system. We unkinked the hose and fixed all the leaks and the AC started working well again.