WEDNESDAY, 02.18.09

Ted Waitt Personal Log Entry
Woke up to a beautiful sunrise over Howland Island; enjoying a nice, peaceful and calm morning even though we can’t anchor here. As we departed Howland, I was struck by a few things. First, we received a glorious escort away from the Island by 20+ dolphins — our dog, Domino, was thrilled and enchanted by them. Second, the island was really hard to see, even a mile or so off shore. We just caught our first glimpse of the R/V Seward Johnson. We’re headed there after lunch. They’ll be recovering one of the vehicles, so we’ll want to be aboard long before that.

Ted Waitt Personal Log Entry
I made the transfer from my boat to the Seward Johnson. Very hairy, scary jump from a small tender up to the big boat, but went off without a hitch. In six to eight-foot seas, one second you are two feet above the deck and the next second it’s over your head. Timing is everything.

Saw them recover Ginger (the two AUVs are named Mary Ann and Ginger). Pretty cool stuff. We learned Ginger only collected sonar data on one side. In four days on station, they’ve only completed survey on two boxes in six dives for a total of 50 square miles. They should be at 150 square miles to be on plan and optimally, if all was perfect, at a maximum potential of nearly 200 square miles. Not good. The vehicles aren’t performing reliably and there are some human issues, too. I expected a ramp-up, but not this bad. Hopefully, they will improve. We’ve got a great team of smart and dedicated people who are scratching their heads on some of the issues, but hopefully, they’re resolvable issues. I met the film crew, and the biologist, and saw some scary “monsters” they’ve already recovered from the deep ocean. Cool. We set a tentative plan to shoot video from the chopper. That should be fun.

After we returned to our boat, we headed to Baker for a nice quiet night. Baker is just a carbuncle on the ocean. Just saw the green flash from the sunset across the ocean. Nice. I plan to return to the Seward Johnson tomorrow.

0314: Day 3 (Yesterday, February 17)
Today saw some gains and a pretty serious hiccup. When last we left our intrepid explorers yesterday evening, Mary Ann had launched at 1715 to survey box 2a and was also programmed to do a quick re-acquire mission on a target from box 1a that was very nearby her mission. At that time, Ginger was already down after being repaired twice and was working away on box 1b. We also had made a late night tow of the codend (which is a fancy fisherman’s term for a trawl net), but it was more of a practice run than a successful effort due to the shutter on the collection device prematurely activating.

This morning Ginger returned at 1134 and had completed her mission. She definitely encountered some serious terrain during her mission, but all systems were working up to snuff and she avoided any difficulties. During the analysis of her data there was a “holy cow” moment when we saw what appeared to be a very hot target right near a turn. Andy Sherrell and I discussed it at length. As we looked at it further, and then from another angle, we thought we saw it after the turn and it looked a lot like an aircraft. The target was in some pretty serious geology but the first image of it showed it to be much more reflective than the surrounding area. That, in combination with what we thought was another look at it from a different angle (as the vehicle turned) where it resembled a plane, had everyone pretty excited for a while.

Further analysis showed us that the second image (the aircraft-looking thing) was not the same target. Indeed, it was much less reflective than the original image and in the wrong place. Also, when we finally did figure out where the original target was located in the record after the turn, it lost much of its allure. Pretty typical for a target in geology that is roughly the right size and a hot reflector, we all got pretty het up about the whole thing. Analysis showed that the original hot reflector was in an area that was catching a lot of sonic energy and was perhaps a bit misleading, and the plane shape seemed to be geology as well. I’ve been here before. Everyone gets all excited and then we look at it and look at it, and do the rest of the work, and in the end, Andy pretty much thinks it is not even likely worth another look.

So we got Ginger’s batteries changed out and got her into the water at 1523, where she is now working on box 2b (her fourth mission). All indications are that she is performing well.

Mary Ann was then recovered from her second mission at 1850 this evening. We were anxious to see what she had found on her re-imaging run, as well as look at another box (2a) worth of data. We were sorely disappointed to learn for some reason she had stopped pinging her sonar about two-thirds of the way through her first line. The big problem with this is that we had not been near enough to her for hours to read her indications; indeed, if we had, we would have detected that the EdgeTech sonar was not running and we could have aborted her. This may have been somewhat avoidable but I also think it was part of our learning curve.

We are finding that working two vehicles and two boxes at once that are separated by an hour of running time is tough. Add to that, we are still working out protocols with the ship for running on one engine when we can to conserve fuel. We also need to give the ship a 20-minute notice anytime we want to use the deck equipment (LARS) so they can spin up the generator, and now we realize we need to give them a two-hour notice any time we want to move fast to launch or recover a vehicle in a box other than the one we are working in. This, too, is a learning curve and today it cost us. If we had been more on the ball getting the engines up to speed, we may have been faster getting closer to our grounds at a time that would have allowed us to detect Mary Ann had stopped using her sonar. It was a solid body blow; we did not get the info from box 2a after 20 hours, and now we need to survey that box again. A hard lesson.

So, what went wrong with her? Why did she stop surveying? We are not yet sure. We are pretty confident it is not a hardware issue, the equipment works fine on the bench and she definitely knew that she wasn’t pinging and indicated it (we just weren’t there to get the message). That leads us to believe the problem is a software issue. The difficulty there is that it’s the middle of the night on the East Coast and we need to access both the EdgeTech and Hydroid people to find out what the heck happened. We need to send them the log files. What to do in the meantime? No way am I gonna let her sit on board overnight while we wait to hear back from the folks in the rear, especially if the hardware is all testing okay on the bench. So we just put her back in the water. She launched at 2354 and this time, we will stay in the area and listen to her all night if we need to.

One other note (and this one is good news/bad news/good news). Although Mary Ann’s sonar stopped pinging, she did indeed split off and run back into box 1a and try to re-image the target from that box. And even though her sonar was not communicating with the vehicle, she did take some photos, which is good news. However, it was the first time we had used that particular camera (it came into Samoa the day before we left and was just installed), and there is an intermittent issue with the camera, which looks like a data logging issue. Some of the pictures look like white noise, but in the middle of the noise you can see the wash from the strobe so it seems to be working on some level, even in those faulty pictures. That’s the bad news (although not heinous bad, probably software or logging problem, not hardware). The other good news? We did get a picture of a big rock pile, so that target is off the list and Mary Ann was not programmed to try that re-acquisition again on the re-survey of 2a. Greg Packard is working diligently on both the sonar and camera issue now.

Other news of the day is that we are working on some metrics we will begin presenting tomorrow at the 1230 meeting so we can take account of our efficiency and try to improve. I wish I had them all right now, but I don’t. We’ve been a tad distracted over the last few hours. We plan to meet with Ted Waitt tomorrow during his first visit and incorporate this information into a new daily report at that time.

Lastly, we are going to try and tow the codend again tonight. We made some adjustments to the equipment and the release on the collection device, so that should be good to go tonight. Not sure I will be awake for that, so the night crew may take that over. I want an early start tomorrow. As both vehicles are in the water, I might try and grab a little sleep until the next event. I might go down for a few and get back up in three hours, when that net comes back up, to see if we got any neat creepy crawlies. Just not sure at this moment. If there are any cool critters I’ll send some pics.

Weather seems to be coming down a bit and warming up. Irish night in the galley: corned beef and baby potatoes. Quote for the day came from Greg: “All I wanna do is Snagit and you guys all come running over. Can’t I Snagit in private!?” I’ll let you decipher that.

1717: From Ted Waitt, Depth
Wonder how many reliability issues we’re having that are related to the depth. I wouldn’t be surprised. That seems to be our main issue and you need to ride them on it.

2020: Re: Depth
Roger that. I’m hoping this one isn’t, but it’s the first we’ve had that really indicates depth as an issue. Reliability has definitely been a problem though. I’m already on attention to detail. I had to take a timeout when that quick disconnect issue happened. How in the heck do you check on one end of a hose and not the other?

2003: To Dominique Rissolo, Ted Waitt Back On His Ship
Visit went very well. He spoke with the teams at length, watched a recovery and the initial analysis. We had an issue with the data there too (arggghh). No data on the starboard channel, so Mary Ann will go back in and re-image that box from the other direction. No issues were found on the vehicle. We will run it backwards and if it happens again, we cover the ground. Issue happens again and we will replace that bottle.

Ted met with the film crew. They just got back on his ship and I would say the visit went very well, all smiles. They are going back toward Howland Island and returning tomorrow. We’re setting up some film work for later in the week. All good. More tonight.

2233: Re: P8 Efficiency
We’re discussing our options now as to how we can increase efficiency, but if we don’t get to vehicle reliability, all the trimming of the fat we do on the surface won’t do us any good. I am still hoping these sonar issues are software-related, but I just don’t know. It’s vexing — anything you do to fix one thing takes away from another. If we don’t go the full Monty on the mission as far as bottom time because we’re trying to dial in reliability through testing, then we’re burning two and a half to three hours descent and ascent time each way and getting little for it. We can have them drive down to shorten descents, but then we lose bottom time due to power consumption. A better idea is to drive up, which we are doing with this mission on Ginger to test that out. If we add more weight to quicken descent, we outweigh the ascent weight and risk anchoring it to the bottom for 24 hours until the magnesium link melts on the descent anchor.

They definitely are behaving less reliably than they did in our 1,000 meter tests, and the one thing that changed was the software (which Andy Sherrell and Lee Frey were uncomfortable about when Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution told us they had done it, but not really tested). We knew they were gonna patch some stuff but they basically re-wrote the whole backbone software. I still hope this is the issue, but if not, we got problems. We definitely need to make sure everyone in the rear is up and running on our issues because we cannot afford to be testing on our search grounds with times like these. One thing is for certain: we can’t afford any more operator errors.

It’s tough to figure out where to push though because wherever you push, something else pulls. Like I say, we’re discussing trimming the fat now, but we need the vehicles doing their thing first. It totally freaks me out when they do nothing to fix a problem and put the vehicle back in the water because it tests okay on the bench. All I can do is mouth concern, but at the end of the day we want Greg working positively with us and that means not second guessing him too much.

We can never do two dives per vehicle per day though, more bottom time is more mapping time and our optimum bottom period power consumption-wise is 18 hours. Figure we get descents to three hours (powered ascents when possible to shave that to one hour), and average three-hour turnarounds as we did yesterday. Eighteen (18) hours on the bottom maps 28 square miles (one box is 28). That’s 56 miles per 25 hours (both vehicles), but we’ve already forfeited that average with the missions we’ve already lost.

I’ll be honest with you: I’m doing everything I can to increase our numbers, but the bottom line is we gotta just keep working hard and driving on. That and find it.

Ted Waitt Personal Log Entry
There is a real comfortable, no posturing and relaxed sense of competent teamwork between the various parties on this boat. They’re just getting down to business and will get things headed in the right direction.