Hi Everyone,
Today we arrived at Orkney Passage and began bringing up the moorings, we had six moorings to bring up in total, and aimed to (and managed to) bring up four over the course of the day. As we would be redeploying four of the moorings, once they were brought on board, there was a big rush to take the instruments, wash and clean them, change batteries, download data and prepare them for calibration and eventual redeployment. This took quite a while, although I did get rather adept at working with the Aquadopps (underwater current speed instruments) and sbe37s (underwater temperature and pressure instruments).
As we got towards the evening we were informed that all of the buoyancy spheres for the next moorings needed processing, by opening them up, closing them, reattaching them to the rope and changing the fittings on either side of the rope. Until this moment, I think very few of us had realised the importance and urgency of this task (had to be done before deploying each mooring). I managed to persuade a group of people (mostly the students) to help me with the moorings, which they very kindly and enthusiastically did.
However, we realised quickly that this job was going to take waaaayy longer than we expected, with the first 12 spheres taking almost 4 hours. Given we had five people working for most of that time and that we had 70 spheres to do for the upcoming four moorings, this was not promising and made us somewhat surprised that more people and equipment hadn’t been assigned to this job more urgently.
On the plus side, though, we managed to have a great time, with some fantastic tunes provided by Pip and Sarah (amongst others) and our gradual increase in proficiency with the variety of tools we were using leading to a significant increase in speed as time went on. By the end of the stint it was around 2am and everyone was starting to lose it a little bit, but we had completed some more spheres and had at least finished all of those needed for the first mooring, before leaving the task to the night shift. It feels like most of my day tomorrow will be spent doing these spheres….
21/01/23
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