LEG 2 SURVEY BEGINS

WEDNESDAY, 04.08.09

2255: Day 1 (Yesterday, April 7)
Avanti! The girls are in the water. We arrived at our first Deep Ocean Transponder (DOT) deployment waypoint last night at just after 8 p.m. Over the course of the next eight hours, we deployed and surveyed in four DOTs that will allow us to work the next 6 boxes up the A and B rows of the search grid.

I copped a few hours of sleep, then got up around 1 a.m. and kind of looked over everyone’s shoulders while they finished the DOT survey and prepared to launch Mary Ann. My big contribution was to put the new nose art on the girls.

Mary Ann rolled out of her van around 0430, but it became immediately clear we were having Wi-Fi communication problems with the vehicle. This system is used to communicate with the vehicle when it is on the surface, to give it commands during recovery and to run through final checks before launch. We can run them without it using a little over the side transducer fish, but it’s kind of like flying blind. We tried to bring the Wi-Fi up on deck for a bit, and then rolled it back into the van. We checked the connectors and seemed to get it back up, but we rolled it back into the LARS and it suffered the same intermittent failure.

‘Intermittent’ is a curse word in the underwater equipment world. An intermittent ground fault is the very worst. Can’t fix it if you can’t find it. If it’s gonna break, then let it break all the way. Anyway, we ran her back in the van and opened her up, spent roughly another hour on it before we decided the fix was definitely not gonna be a quickie. We pulled our forces from Mary Ann’s van into Ginger’s at 0730. Ginger was programmed, prepped and launched, going into the water at 0900.

These launch times are a bit slow, but right now that’s okay with me. I got new crew all over the ship and deck (in all departments, including on the helm), and I want everyone learning everything they need to know before it gets really busy. Now is the time for deliberation and some training. A half hour saved now that costs us an evolution later is the kind of worry that keeps me up at night. I refuse to believe we cannot beat the numbers we posted after the last Leg (which, in my mind, were unacceptable even if you take out the multitude of equipment failures).

I’m keeping it friendly, but by the end of the cruise these guys are going to be really sick of me looking over their shoulders and admonishing them to be safe, be alert and pay attention to detail. Keep moving! Slow down. Hurry up! Where we at? But now we absolutely have to bring it. We cannot afford user errors; we cannot afford anything. Every time we lose a mission, we lose a significant portion of our capability to be successful and I want to find this target. Tomorrow would be nice, right?!

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, so we got Ginger in around 0900 and the teams went back to working on Mary Ann. We opened up her bottle, checked connectors, replaced the Ethernet hub and got some better speeds, but still got an intermittent failure of the Wi-Fi. Greg Packard then replaced the D-Pack which is basically the wireless radio transmitter — we’ve got three of these spares aboard — and that did it. The day crew launched her at 1623, 12 hours after our initial attempt. (Arrrgghhh!) Breathe. Be calm.

All good. The girls are down working and all indications are nominal. Andy Sherrell has sent pretty much the last iteration of the search grid to Ted Waitt for his approval and comment. The dates have somewhat finalized for us to finish on or around May 12 — with the understanding that if we are successful, even up to the last minute, we will stay out here and do a site survey.

Morale is high. That’s it for now.