THURSDAY, 04.23.09

1405: Update
I just saw the coolest thing out on the back deck. I observed a booby, the somewhat clunky pigeon/gull combo bird so common out here, tuck in and dive from about 150 feet, straight down into the ocean to nail a fish. A fairly neat thing to see! We were motoring past on our way to pick up a Deep Ocean Transponder (DOT), and I followed his progress. He bobbed back to the surface after a few seconds and clearly got something. After perhaps thirty seconds more, he waddled back into the air. It looked like he may have been carrying something, but he was too far outside my range of vision to be certain. I sort of left the experience behind, but was casually following his flight. Then, like a streak of lightning, I saw another bird cut across the sky on a course 45 degrees horizontal to the booby’s, traveling at perhaps three times its speed. It came in directly under the booby and turned on a dime, wings and tail flaring, executing a break-neck turn that must have scared the crap out of the booby (it startled me a quarter of a mile away). The booby must have bobbled what it had left in its craw because the other predator seemed to come out of the encounter carrying something with it. The other bird was a Magnificent Frigatebird, easily the most awesome sea bird (as well as the local soul chicken). Their profile is unique: they are skilled thieves, extremely efficient flyers that can glide for days without hardly moving their wings, and they are big — three and a half feet from head to tail, with a seven-foot wingspan! Revered by the Polynesians as sea guides and totems, they have knife-like wings and a split tail they use in combination to soar effortlessly or turn into sky daggers in an instant. It was one of the coolest bird-watching things I’ve ever seen (okay, a tad nerdy, but you had to see it. Truly awesome).

To business: the girls are working along. We had some issues the last couple days. The biggest problem was that during one of Mary Ann’s dives, she was not taking navigation guidance from one of our DOTs. This was the first time we had used this particular DOT and though it had tested okay, we were getting indications from the vehicle that she was not responding to it. We aborted the mission, and started trying to sort out the issue. Checks of the vehicle showed no issue with programming or systems. We decided it was likely a problem with the DOT, and we were in something of a pinch to replace it. We now have five channels of DOTs and the current grid dictates we need three different channels in a row, so we did not have the DOT channel needed to replace the faulty one. I suggested we skip this particular box and go down to the next one while we sorted out the issue. This advice was taken, and we ran down south to launch a vehicle into a new box outside the troubled DOTs field. At that time, we had both vehicles on deck and it took us a few hours to sort out the issues. By the time we got down to the area to launch, we made the call to launch Ginger first so we could chase down a ground fault in Mary Ann.

As previously mentioned, intermittent ground faults are the bane of our existence; they always crop up. Normally, we get a value reflected in the vehicle log indicating the ground fault percentage. Three to six percent is pretty normal. During Mary Ann’s brief dive before aborting due to bad nav, we were seeing a 60 percent value. When we tested her on the surface, it was back down to just three percent. Very vexing. We now know the depth is causing it, which is not unusual, but we can’t replicate it on the surface. We have a depth chamber (we call it the ocean), but we lose four hours to test in it. The problem could be a pinhole in a cable, or just a slight intrusion of water into a connector. Very tough to detect. The boys just cleaned out all the connections and tried to get it to fault by jiggling the connectors with water running over them, but nothing. We finally made the call to just launch her back into the depths to see if the numbers spiked. Whatever we did, we found the problem, because there was no ground fault indicated. Zero percent as of the last check. Very nicely done.

Both girls are currently working. We have farmed a DOT from cleared boxes in the north to replace the problem DOT, and we are chugging along nicely. Morale is up and everybody is on the job, doing good work. It’s a team to be proud of, for sure.

A breakdown on the times is as follows:

April 21:
0430 Transited to recover DOT
0516 Released DOT
0630 Recovered DOT
0700 Transited back to ops area
1536 Recovered Mary Ann
1651 Recovered Ginger
2105 Launched Mary Ann to survey box 6E

April 22:
0015 Aborted Mary Ann due to negative nav from DOT
0115 Recovered Mary Ann
0600 Launched Ginger to survey box 6/7F
1556 Launched Mary Ann to survey box 6/7E
1732 Transited to deploy DOT
1836 Deployed DOT and survey
2057 Transited back to ops area
2230-0100 Deployed trawl net for bio assay

April 23:
0337 Recovered Ginger
0631 Launched Ginger to survey box 7/8F

1501: From Ted Waitt
Ah, the eternal battle between the boobies and the frigates. Love that. The boobies do the work, and the frigates steal the spoils. I’ve witnessed this in Galapagos, Las Perlas and other places, from the Mediterranean to Australia. The boobies’ feet and beaks change color from place to place, and the frigates change size, color and intensity. But the battle is the same. It’s a strange battle, but somehow a symbiotic relationship sort of like the Democrats and Republicans, or the Hatfields and McCoys.

1707: My Response to Ted Waitt
Ha! That’s awesome. I just found out from Baja Steve Dabagian that frigatebirds can’t land on water. I could never figure out how the Polynesians used them to find land until I had that little piece of data. That was so cool, he just came zooming in there so fast, and then literally turned on the spot and jagged straight up into that booby, in like a foot’s distance. He had to be doing 40 to 50 miles per hour. It was spectacular.