Day 3: Sailing East

The day began very early for me. I stayed up late last night fine tuning our Knudsen echo-sounder. It’s a depth finder that reports back the depth of the sea floor below.

We are traveling at nearly 12 knots and the unit was having problems keeping track and report a reliable depth. Bottom tracking was initially off and the readings would simply jump anywhere from 900 to 4000 meters without cause or reason. The display showed lots of noise, and the data was unreliable. After hours of tweaking with pulse length and ping rate, it seemed to come together nicely. The date was more consistent and the graph showed a nice graph which trends downwards as we headed out of Barbados.

After lunch, I worked on my first wire splicing job. The wiring for the CTD (Conductivity Temperature and Depth) sensor cable needed a new terminal stopper. It’s a simple task, but care was required. The entire process took a couple hours because of the successive coats of super 33+ (expensive electrical) tape and scotch coat. Three coats were laid down, with two hours of drying in between each application. The last step was to cover the area with heat shrink and shrink it with a heat gun.

Later in the afternoon, I started writing a maintenance manual for a Benthos pinger (transducer used as a beacon). This device is clamped onto the winch cable and used to gauge the depth of the package while it descends. The manual will be used by tech to service the pinger and also gives instructions on the proper battery replacement procedures. This device is capable of going 10,000 meters deep, and so it has its particulars that need knowing.

The maintenance procedures are relatively simple but thoroughness is very critical to keep the device operational. I plan one including some photos along with the text. The paper will cover the procedures for replacing O-Rings and batteries on the “Benthos Pinger”.

Later on in the evening, we arrived at our first sampling site. We attached the pinger to the winch line and sent it down with the multi-corer. The pinger uses sound as the method by which we track it. It pings at one hertz and the soundings (waves) register on our screens as a line or a trace that can be tracked down to the sea floor. This will give us the location of the pinger in the water column while it descends to the bottom of the ocean.