Hi Everyone,
Today will probably be a fairly short blog post, even though it was a very long day. From when I woke up until when I went to bed I was working almost constantly on the buoyancy spheres. You may remember that despite our best efforts the previous night we had only managed to get through 10-15 in a few hours, and we had 70 to do in total.
Thanks to the sterling work of some heroes on the night shift, this number had been reduced significantly, and we only had around 40 left to do. But this still seemed a tall order to get all of them done in time for the mooring deployments tomorrow (on top of all the instrument prep as well!).
Thankfully, everyone was incredibly enthusiastic and willing to help, with volunteers in an almost constant stream. Due to the limited supply of 13mm tools and jobs that needed doing, we could only really use 4-5 people working at any one time (6 at one point). This meant that I was actually in the position of having to turn away many enthusiastic volunteers. However, it did mean the work went much faster, especially as we began to master the use of the torque guns, drills and rachet tools. With everyone working together we managed to get through all of them by about 10pm, even if many of the portable speakers brought to entertain us died on the way.
Alongside the buoyancy spheres, today the last mooring was taken on board and the first of the moorings to be deployed (which we had only sorted the buoyancy for late last night) was released. A good start and hopefully the weather will hold so that we can get as many of the remaining 3 moorings done tomorrow as possible. We worked to prepare the mooring instruments into the early hours of the morning. For me this involved changing batteries in the SBE39s and helping to set up the releases. The SBE39s are essentially temperature and pressure sensors designed to work at significant depths under water while the releases are what we communicate with to send the mooring back up to the surface.
22/01/23
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