TUESDAY, 04.14.09

0856: Day 7 (Yesterday, April 13)
So far so good, the girls are doing their thing nicely. A little breakdown on the last 30 hours:

April 12:
2319 Ginger up on deck

April 13:
0241 Ginger back into the water
0918 Mary Ann up on deck
1521 Mary Ann back in the water
1912, 2023, 2109, 2149 DOTs deployed into the E boxes

April 14:
0106 Ginger back on deck
0450 DOT recovery from 18a

We are getting Ginger ready to go back in the water, but this will be delayed by roughly two hours as we have run back to Box 18a to recover a Deep Ocean Transponder (DOT). We anticipate getting Ginger back in around 6 a.m. That’s the sum and substance of the last day. There is a perfectly good reason why it took so long to get Mary Ann back into the water — we had a fairly nice target in the record and we took the time to evaluate it thoroughly. We then changed the plan from a regular and continuing survey and programmed a re-acquisition run, which Mary Ann will do before continuing her survey in box 20/21a.

There are actually two targets in a fairly straight line running from the lower SE corner of box 20a, in a line heading NW. We sent Mary Ann down to re-image and photograph these targets and look at them with short-range sonar. Neither is large enough to be the plane, but both are very hot reflectors. As well, neither is a super gorgeous target, but there is nothing else in the area to suggest they are geology. Meaning, if we don’t look at them now, we will definitely want to come back later. So, it’s better to hit them now while the DOTs are still in the area. That mission is now underway and should be back around 2 p.m. tomorrow.

This is one of the semi-confusing reports, lots of numbers. After getting Mary Ann in the water, we ran two hours and set four DOTs in the E lines, but did not have time to survey them in. We then ran back and recovered Ginger. While we went over data and readied her to launch again, we ran down to recover a DOT. This may not seem very efficient, but it works for our overall plan for the next couple days. We plan to program Ginger to finish out Box 21b, and then run over and do the last remaining lines of box 21a. We will launch her around 0600. Then, we will loiter and monitor Mary Ann until she comes up around 1400. At that point, we will again run two hours over to the DOTs we laid last night in the E boxes and spend four to six hours surveying them in. We will then launch Mary Ann into one of those boxes, and run back the two hours down to the A/B lines and pick up Ginger from the last survey. We will also recover the last three DOTs in this area once we have cleared the sonar data. Then we will run back up and get Ginger into the other E lane.

Like I said, it sounds a tad confusing but it’s a good plan and gets a heck of a lot of work done in 48 hours. Let’s hope it all becomes unnecessary around 2 p.m. this afternoon. Talk to ya then.

TARGET 3: CHAIN/PIPE

2016: Targets
One target turned out to be what looks like a chain, but we are still trying to clean up the imagery. The other one we did not see on camera, but from the record, it looks like it is a little bigger than one and a half meters with a shadow eight meters long (so sticking up that high). We’re still working on why we didn’t see it; we think we went right over it or close enough to it. We thought we actually got closer to it than the chain. As I say, we are still sorting this stuff, but bottom line is that neither is a plane for sure.