0100 Local Time

Hi there!

In just a few hours (0400 Pacific Time) the crew and science party of the R/V Sally Ride will be getting underway for the OOI Coastal Endurance Array cruise. The back deck and surrounding labs and staging areas are fully loaded for the recovery and deployment of 12 uncabled platforms and 6 gliders off of the Washington and Oregon coasts over the span of the next 16 days. As I mentioned last week, this project is directed at monitoring long-term environmental changes and impacts on ecosystems due to climate change. The program is planned to run for 20-25 years, so there is a real opportunity to identify episodic events on a meaningful timescale.

 

(Image Sources: OOI)

I met the ship this past Friday at the cruise ship terminal in Seattle. It is quite a busy spot with massive cruise ships offloading and onloading passengers most days of the week. The Sally Ride is tied up stern to stern next to the Roger Revelle, as both Scripps ships just finished a joint-effort science operation. This afforded me the opportunity to see familiar faces from the crews, technicians, and science parties on each vessel. It was a very fun reunion of sorts and the de-mobilization and mobilization of cruises for both ships has made for a very busy few days. Thankfully, we got everything loaded up and all major equipment tested for our first deployments near the Washington shelf, which will keep us occupied through Friday. At that time, we will head south to Newport, Oregon and load up the ship with new mooring equipment to be deployed off the Oregon and Washington coasts all through next week. We will then return to Newport a second time to load up for our third and final set of deployments. This sort of back-and-forth transit schedule may seem silly, but the sheer size of this equipment necessitates multiple loading as you can see by the photos below. Also pictured is a massive water weight that we filled via the fantail firehouse connection. This weight was suspended on a line strung through the A-frame block and run from the heavy-lift winch (HLW). It allowed the OOI team to weight test the winch and calibrate the tension values on the control panel and remote reader.

Honestly, it has not really sunk in yet that this will be my final science cruise of this internship. It is 5 months to the day since I set off on the first cruise on the R/V Neil Armstrong. That seems like a long time to be sailing continuously. However, I have learned so much since then and had the opportunity to work with some great technicians and a variety of hard-working science groups with very specialized equipment and mission goals. Each cruise has offered so many new learning opportunities and no two have been the same. This constancy of change is refreshing and I think is the driving reason why it is surprising that this is the last cruise (only for now, of course).

More soon!

– Emily