6/23-6/29
The days are really blending together now. I feel like I was just in New York a week ago but I also feel like I’ve been working on the boat for a year. Overall, I’m still having a blast, and everyday I’m excited to be on shift. Deployments have been going well, but we are having difficulties with the samples. At one point we were all really really excited that 5 out of 8 samples were usable. The ocean conditions were not the best but we were also dealing with issues with the shuttles. There’s a lot of discussion on how we can improve them. We’ve been adding wooden blocks to the bottom to help the shuttles not penetrate the bottom too deeply.
One of the days, the main block (the pulley that the winch wire is run through) on the A-frame was making an awful sound. Turns out the bolts used were too small and some had snapped. It was a really great example of how amazing the engineers on the ship are because they erected scaffolding and had it fixed within the hour. I wish I knew his last name but Sam, the Chief Engineer, has literally fixed every problem that comes up in record time. I am beyond amazed by him and his team.
I also got to see an ARGO float! Which is something I’ve learned about in college and have used their data for projects. The deployment was pretty straight forward but it was amazing to have that hands-on experience with something i’ve only read about.
