Breaths were held, bets were placed, and prayers were uttered last Friday as we got ready to float free. In all honesty, maybe it wasn’t as dramatic a moment as it felt like, but it was still pretty important. We had been working on the ship for a couple weeks, and it seemed like we had opened up every possible place water could leak in. Not to say that a loose bolt would have sunk the ship (Knock on wood; stranger things have happened), but it still would have been a massive pain to lift the ship back up and fix anything that went wrong. Luckily for us, the worst part about the undocking was that it started at 4:30 in the morning. Because we started early, the undocking finished pretty early, and I spent the rest of the day working on 3D printing a new soldering tray for the tech department. 

Since we went back in the water, everyone has been getting the ship ready to go back to sea. One of our biggest concerns has been getting the CTD back up and running. Carmen, one of the other techs, and I spent an entire day rebuilding the CTD sensor array. It was really interesting to see how every sensor is connected to each other and how it’s able to collect so much data. It took the two of us another whole day to get the CTD cable ready to use. Remember how we had to take the cable off the drum to lube it? To do that, we had to cut the end off, which meant losing the connection to the CTD. Luckily, the cable terminations need to be redone every few months anyway, so this gave us a good opportunity. The cable actually needed two separate terminations: one mechanical, to support the CTD and deploy it, and one electrical, to relay telemetry from the sensors to the computer lab. The electrical termination was a relatively simple matter of soldering the wires in the cable to a connector. The mechanical connection was more tricky. It works by securing a bullet-shaped piece of metal to the wire with several steel coils wrapped around it. A housing is then attached over this piece, which prevents it from moving along the cable, allowing it to hold weight without slipping. Needless to say, nothing is simpler than on paper, so actually attaching the termination was rather difficult. The metal coils didn’t want to cooperate, and it took some artful maneuvering with a lever to get them in place. Beyond that, the threads in part of the housing had become damaged, and it wasnt until we had taken the whole thing apart that we figured it out. It was frustrating, but we got it, and we all learned a lot more about terminating a cable.

The CTD was the big job this week, and it still needs to get wrapped up. Other than that, this week has been light. I designed some parts for the centerboard and cleaned out the science fridge spaces, but our shipyard work is wrapping up. We set sail in exactly one week, so I’ll check in before that.