Hi all,
This week we finished up mooring recoveries and have started our transit back home. We’re heading home early because we had great weather during science operations and needed no weather delays. There’s a hurricane coming through the North Atlantic and we have altered our route so that we can avoid as much of the bad weather as possible. Because of that we are sailing through a big chunk of ice country, and the captain has requested that I assist watches on the bridge from 10pm to 2am so there are extra eyes looking for ice.
The last flanking mooring recovery went as usual, however, operations changed when it came time to recover the surface mooring. Typically we bring the buoy on first and then the cable, however, since the surface mooring has a large buoy and it’s the last buoy to recover there wasn’t much deck room. So we triggered the acoustic release and deployed the rescue boat to attach a tag line to the end of cable to bring the cable up first and the buoy last.
During deck ops for the surface mooring recovery I helped pull in the synthetic line that was at the base of the mooring as well as operate the winch that was spooling up the mooring’s cable.
Once those operations were over and we were transiting back to WHOI, I finished a label project that I had started earlier in the cruise. In the transducer room, where most all scientific transducers are, I created permanent labels to show type of water (fresh or seawater) and direction of water in the pipes. (The new labels look pretty good, if I say so myself!)
We’re hitting some weather today, but we plan on being back at WHOI in about a week’s time!
~Lauren