Blogs from Oceans and Seas - page 100

….And we’re back! Days 11 and 12 (18 and 19 July) are in the books with plenty of excitement, trials, and tribulations. When we last left each other, we had a line snap and a TRM crashing back to the seafloor. Jason and Medea were called into action and they were hot on the trail of retrieval. Well, Jason clipped on and the collection process began until a series of large swells got the best of our line again…. You guessed it…. SNAP! It’s an old sailor’s tale that the Pacific doesn’t give up her TRM’s when the skies of July turn gloomy. I guess that is Lake Superior not the Pacific, lives not TRM’s, and November not July, but you get the idea, she wasn’t letting go of FN09A quite yet. It would be another ... read more

Days 9 and 10. Monday July 16th and Tuesday July 17th First order of business, I’m noticing that days 6 and 7 have somehow managed to sink to the first page of my blogging, so they are there, just out of order. Now on to the new stuff! Monday kicked off with an OBS deployment bang. When John and I relieved the mid-watch (0000-0400 for you newcomers), we were in transit to site M10B for an A-Frame (TRM) deployment. Within a half hour, we were on site and preparing for action. The co-chief scientist, Dr. Richard Allen, requested a move to the north in accordance with a recommendation from local fisherman that had hung their nets on a rock structure in the area. Of course for seismologists, no fisherman = no OBS’s stuck in their nets, ... read more

Day 7 . As promised yesterday, we have a guest writer on the blog today! We all know what this really means…. I got lazy and just copied our Lamont blog for continuity purposes. She did a great job though, so enjoy! Saturday, July 14th 2012 This morning I woke up to calmer waters than the ones I had fallen asleep to (last night I felt as if I was on a roller coaster that was going around and around in continuous choppy circles). Feeling a bit more tired than usual, Natsumi (my roommate, who is a graduate student from Brown University studying Seismology) and I woke up around 7am for our 8am watch. Breakfast on the ship is served starting at 7:15, and it is customary for watch standers to try and eat first so ... read more

Day 5. By the time we woke up for our next watch, excitement, albeit negative excitement, was high. Last night while on site for Jason testing, a winch test of a Trawl Resistant Mount (essentially a hood that covers the OBS and protects it from fisherman nets) failed. The line snapped under the weight of the hood for reasons unknown and the hood was lost overboard. Thankfully we can put our faith in the capable robotic hands of Jason to save the day. A plan was implemented to deploy Jason down to the bottom of approximately 950 meters of water to search for our renegade TRM. Needless to say, John and I were pumped that Jason was about to spring into action on our watch because that means we were headed to the control room (photo ... read more

On the 1st of July we left St. Katherine Docks, descending the lock under a blackening sky, and leaving Tower Bridge and its giant Olympic Rings to recede. Friends had braved the chill breeze in shorts and jumpers to help us with the lines, their sunglasses an optimistic sham. We had exchanged hopes of a reunion in Falmouth in a few weeks time, but it is hard to keep to a definite plan at sea, so perhaps those were our last goodbyes. We left them there, those marvellous and kindly people of the sea, with their own ambitions, their own plans, two years after arriving. Despite our long preparations - the courses and exams, the fixing and repairing, the search for the boat in the first place, the endless ordering and collecting of things, the practice ... read more