Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Not promising, 12-4

I may officially be ready to be done with this cruise. All these frustrations trying to recover these Lamont instruments is really getting me down and I think I am ready to go home and return to normalcy. We picked up the last two Scripps instruments today, but one of them has a 22 second clock delay, which means its going to be a pain correcting for that in the data. If I had known that recovery cruises would end up being this depressing, maybe I wouldn't have come!

As for the last Lamont instrument, we've been trying to communicate with it for about three hours now with no success. Just like the previous one. Don seems to think that perhaps the glass spheres imploded and damaged the transponder. This would be why we aren't able to establish communication at all. We've tried lots of different things, and now we are towing the portable transducer around trying to get a ping. I am about to go on shift and the thought of sitting downstairs in their lab for four hours, hopelessly listening to nothingness is giving me a headache. I really don't want to do this. We have about two-three days left before we need to start our four day transit back to Guam, so this could go on for a while.

Luckily tonight was spaghetti and meatballs, a nice big bowl of comfort for me. I topped it off with some butter pecan ice cream, but I don't know what will fill the void of not getting these instruments back.

As far as I can tell, I bet this is going to be our final outcome:

2 comments:

  1. I feel so bad for you. I know this is the deepest these have been used but someone needs to talk to Lamont and they should have done more testing to ensure the OBS' could handle these conditions. Good luck.

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  2. Even though you are frustrated, I think you may have been even more so if you didn't go on the cruise. Imagine being at home and wondering what the heck is going on. You'll feel better when you can stretch your legs. The map shows that the first group of obs recoveries looks pretty good, with a pretty good 'scatter pattern' :) Hang in there, sweetie! Sounds like there's still some good food left onboard!

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