Welcome back. This week has been very interesting, we got a lot accomplished. I’ll start with the good news, the circuit breaker was ordered and has finally been installed and tested. The boat is operational and the crew is busy preparing for the last leg of the mission. The marine technician’s director mentioned that there may be an extension of our internship and another mission for us to get more time at sea. This was great news and it felt like maybe our luck had turned around.
This week we have been busy finishing the keel pods that we prepared for painting last week. Alex and I painted the pods with blue anti-fouling paint, it took several days to get all the sides painted and touched up but we did a great job and they look fantastic. The next step will be setting up the sensors and attaching them to the pods so they are ready to insert into the keel. We also helped to troubleshoot the hydrophone system. The technicians were not receiving a data readout on the computer but they could hear underwater sounds in the attached headphones so we determined the data wasn’t being transmitted to the computer. After tracing the circuit out and testing a few connections we came to the conclusion that the new Windows operating system may be causing the issues with data transfer. The lead tech is emailing SoundGuard, the company that makes the hydrophone software, to see if the problem is related to software compatibility.
Thanks for checking in,
Jake the Intern