After six hours of desperately trying to communicate to the Lamont instrument, we decided to leave. We sent enable codes, burn codes, and tried to range to it to get a location, but we were just unable to get any consistent pings in return from the instrument. So, we basically don't know anything. We don't know whether the OBS was enabled, whether it received our burn commands, and if it did receive our burn commands whether or not it even moved off the bottom. Chances are that it probably was enabled and heard the burns, but is having the same problems as the previous instruments and did not burn off its anchors. The fact that we never got improved communication with it gives a slight indication that it is still on the bottom. We will return to it after two more attempted recoveries and see if we can't establish better communication. But for now, it's not looking good.
The Scripps instrument we recovered very early this morning came up, but didn't have all of its data (which we were told to expect, they knew this one was going to have problems, I don't remember why). But it has about 80% of it, so not too terrible.
The rest of the day I spent knitting with McCall and trying to stay cool and collected. This whole process is very frustrating. The deployment cruise was so much more fun, you just dropped things over the edge and moved on. Now, you get all these problems and uncertainties, not quite as fun.
But, we had a good lunch of Kalua pork sandwiches. And there are butterscotch brownies that I will certainly be indulging in shortly. Dinner was really great too, game hens, cheese manicotti, sauted veggies, and rosemary potatoes. We are on our way to another Scripps site, hopefully we will have better luck with the communication. Even the recovery last night for Scripps took a while for us to ping with the instrument. I think it may be because the seas are slightly choppier. But, trying to keep my hopes up!
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