<< The Grand Lady

by Michael Dessner

Last night, as we were draggin up our gear, the sun set on Expedition to Titanic.

Well folks, that’s a wrap.  We’re underway for St John’s and home.  I’ll be writing this and perhaps one other to talk about the post project clean up and feelings of accomplishment, but first I’d like to say something about the folks working out here.

While my writing has mostly been confined to the work my team did with a few looks into the other aspects of the expedition, I want to take a moment to thank and recognize all the people who did not make into these entries.  There are countless unnamed heroes in work of this kind.  I myself work with a dedicated staff of people in our offices who never see the first thing of our expeditions beyond reports like this, yet their support for me and the work that I help move along for my boss, Ted Waitt, is unflagging.  So to Allie, Ann, Anya, Cherie, Chris, Dawn, Dom, Jacob, Joe, Kathy, Marria, Nicole, Rosa, Sarah, Stan, Tamara, Tiana and Tracy, many thanks for all the support and the hard work you do every day that makes it possible for me to participate in something like this.  A special shout out to my good friend and editor, Tommy Grueskin, for his work in getting all this out to the world.  And last but certainly not least I’d like to thank Dave Russell for his support and trust in me, and without a doubt the man who makes it possible for everyone above to be a part of this very special work, Mr. Ted Waitt, whose generosity and foresight brought this all to fruition.  Ted, I can never repay you for what you’ve helped me to become.  You the man.

Everyone out here has a similar story, the great and talented people from Woods Hole, the folks at Phoenix, Andy’s supporters at HBOI, the people at RMST, the Hays shipping group, all of them played a part and there are many, many people out on this ship whom I never mentioned who simply worked their butts off to make it work.  Of those folks, Bob Sitrick is one I need to thank personally, he handled media out here for RMST and was a huge help; thanks Big Bad Bob, yer a peach.  And to everyone else on the ship and those in the rear who support them, we thank you all.  Job well done.  A big round of applause folks, for the Expedition Titanic team and support staff!   Yaaaaaaay ! !  Hooooorraaaaay !

Alrighty skids, here we are hauling ass for the beach.  Last night at around 8 PM the AUV’s Mary Ann and Ginger were both happily ensconced in their huts after being successfully recovered from their final missions.  By all accounts their performance was exceptional, and kudos to the team from Woods Hole who runs them.  Every single person on board who witnessed their performance and the team that runs them doing their thing commented how smoking hot both were.  Last night, Remora was successfully recovered after which we picked up our Deep Ocean Transponders and hit the road.  We’ve been making fine time since then.  I’m almost afraid to say it for fear of challenging the ocean deities to reverse the situation but we are sailing home with FAIR WINDS AND FOLLOWING SEAS!  OK, there.   I just likely whistled up a storm but, I don’t care!  We are done, successful, no one hurt, all the gear on deck.  Man, you just don’t know how good a feeling that is.  After a month of getting banged around we have stowed the girls and are in giddy up mode.  Vootie!

Last night there was a little wrap party aboard, everyone was in high spirits and the celebrations were exceptionally happy with a huge sense of accomplishment and what, by any measure, was a job well done.  The party was not too boisterous because pretty much everyone is exhausted.

The rest of the world is boiling up and reminding me I have other projects which have languished, damn BlackBerry is turned back on and pinging like a Russian boomer on the sniff. I’ll be honest with you, I think I’m gonna keep this one short and perhaps get one more out before I leave town.

Thanks for following along.

Dessner

<< The Grand Lady

<< The Lab | That’s a Wrap, Indeed. >>

by Michael Dessner

I am sitting in an incongruent brown leather club chair that has somehow made its way aboard the Jean Charcot, semi-stunned by the fact that this wondrous chair is here.  I’ve settled in with my coffee and camera on the bench next to me, wedging my elbows inside the arms of this chair (that I would so love to own) so that I may perch my laptop precariously on my knees and freestyle while watching the last ROV dive of the expedition.  I’m sitting directly behind Evan and Billy.  Looming in front of them are the screens, glowing a deep midnight blue and speckled with the particulate matter that has been ever present during our time out here.  It’s clear from the chatter in the room that the current is pushing everything around, the ROV, the tether, the ship. Navs on the left and the recording suite on my right, we’re all holding our breath, waiting for the first glimpse.  Oh yeah man.  Titanic.  Got your juices flowing?  If not, it should.  I have not spent a lot of time in this room but, I hazard a guess that it never gets routine in here.  You gotta stay frosty to keep your gear alive, get your shot, keep the flow.  And these guys want to squeeze every last minute out of it.

The bottom is just now coming into view, the random pure white crazy little spider crabs, the occasional tracks in the muck left by previous expeditions. Over twenty five years people have been coming here with cutting edge technologies and we can read their sign as if it were yesterday.  Billy tells me that there are few indications of erosion; that the edges of the impact crater from the ships sinking are nearly as crisp and clear as they were the day they happened nearly 100 years ago. This has been evidenced in our high res sonar records and I say again unto thee, the high res sonar stuff is tripping fantastic.  Currents scour the site in a few places where the abyssal floor resembles the contours you might note on the beach or desert as the wind blows around a rock but by and large, the bottom remains as it has for hundreds of years, perhaps longer.  I’m told that the sediment is a thin layer over blocky clay, a sporadic veneer resembling frost here and dust or snow there, but much remains uncovered.

And now the Grand Old Dame herself. Titanic looms in the screen.  We’re looking over the port rail across the front deck to the bow.  The railings stand virtually undamaged in places, in others one or more of the four rails are torn out and protrude horizontally toward the camera, a streamer of destruction; testament to something tearing through as she heeled causing personnel and property to careen down the decks just before she went down by the head.  Huge chains lay across the deck, ripped cables, tangled steel and everything is covered by what look to be rust icicles.  It seems like she’s been in a howling ice storm but these are not crystalline water, Ballard named them well. The bollards and winches look like they could be used tomorrow.  The portholes still have windows in them.  Then, as the ROV traverses, the terrible rending damage exhibits: railings ripped sideways completely off the deck, hanging over the side 10 meters.  It’s hard not to imagine what might have barreled down the decks and ripped them through, whose final moments might have been shared in that terrible millisecond of fear, cacophony and  dissolution.  I’m infinitely grateful that no remains survive these depths.  Some things you cannot forget and there is enough information here without the mortal reminders.

Now we slide down the side of the ship where an anchor hangs.  Everything is coated in rusticle, thick red vines, odd crazed bulbous fungi, metallic stalactites.  They are peculiar, weird and omnipresent, like the growth over a Mayan temple yet these do not hide the massif.  This cathedral remains for us to inspect.

Remora pulls back and up preparing to push back in yet again.  Again the current and scope of the tether change the tempo of this intricate dance of man and machine in the ballroom of the deep.  The anchor winch hangs like a gallows above the deck, fading in and out of the blue shadow, an eerie remnant of the cold blue-white hangman who once worked this garret.  This is muse and I bear witness.   This great monument to mankind’s engineering skill and hubris is once again host to technology that is the pinnacle of our achievement.  We are here with the best man has to offer visiting the skeleton of the precedent centennial iteration.

These images are such a part of our current consciousness, so well known since the films and photos, an icon of our understanding of that time and the ocean and ships in general.  Like visiting New York City for the first time, it is familiar, like coming back to something you have not yet seen, this alien place, unknown despite its familiarity. Certainly only a handful of people in the world understand everything they see here and to a person every one of them wants to bring it to you.  We’re all here to carry this back to mankind, to yield our awe.

The chatter in the room is telling.  Evan guides the ROV pilots to help capture the dramatic framing while also cognizant of the difficulty of their task holding position in the gale of current.  Remora peers under a deck and into the one below and again the fungal growth of the rusticles exhibits.  Chemically metallic suspended sacs of oxidized history.  Billy, who has been out more than most, laments that the best of our days was similar to the worst of his previous.  These are artists.  Brilliant minds that create sensational technology yet bear the hearts of poets.  I feel wonderment.

The windows reflect Remora’s eyes, a mirror of our intrusion into a tomb.  Now and then life presents, an urchin, a small miniature monstrous fish flits past.  As we peer deeper into the wreck you can see yet another reflection from an inner surface spider webbed by the hanging strands of melted metal.  It’s almost frightening as we look onto the Promenade deck and see the reflections from the windows on the interior.  Someone’s home and it is us.  The technology is stupendous, the depth of field, the clarity all boggle the mind.  The detail is such that you can see the splices on the eyelets of lines lying on deck.  And again, Remora rises off the wreck to stare into the infinite azure of the abyss.  I feel that words fail to describe this.  The minutia is stunning: rivets, bolts, and brass, fasteners left long after wood has been eaten away. Fine filaments of unfathomable lifeforms.  We can see 25 feet across the deck, like we are standing where those long past cavorted, ignorant of the icy terror looming in their future.

In places the rusticles are so thick they resemble huge teak or mahogany trees, long muscular ripples of trunk like growth.  Back up to the deck the chasm represented by the tearing apart of the expansion joint again speaks to the forces at play as the ship tumbled through the water column and augured into the bottom.  We peer into the crack and there, resting upright and encrusted, a bath tub, porcelain sharing a hue with the invertebrates, a ghost left undamaged by forces that literally ripped the ship in half around it and then pushed it together like a massive pie crust indented by planetary forces.  How does something like that survive when everything around it is distorted and shredded, windows at crazed angles and canted by the geometry of destruction?  It boggles.

2nd Mate Charles Lightroller Source: Wikipedia

And again back up into the smoke of the ocean around us, miniature crustacean clouds spotted with the occasional pelagic alien flittering past the camera.  Back down to the deck and there, standing in the outboard position, extending over the side, empty of its charge, is a lifeboat davit.  The last time a human hand touched it was 98 years ago as it was steadfastly employed to save lives.  It occurs to me that Lightoller may have stood where I am currently transported, stern in his charge, “women and children first”.  I am chilled by this realization, struck by the poignancy of it.  Another angle and the lifeboat davit turns into the spire of some ancient beast, lone rib of something lost. It’s wonderful and terrible at once to be here and do this amazing work yet to also recall what we see represents real loss and horror.

The moldy looking growths on the sides of the ship look almost like red rock outcrops with the slightest dusting of snow.  Looking over the superstructure and seeing the rise of spires in the background, it’s not enough to say that it’s surreal.  Its hyper real.  Ultra real.  Again I feel at a loss for the grandeur of being able to see this, that we have the ability to witness on this level.

We come up and over the first electric crane ever used on a ship, an encrusted obelisk, a remnant of a first in ocean liners that has been transformed into an artifact by time, seeming so removed from us yet here in the room with us as well.  The last of the first in its final resting place.

Frankly after two hours in here I am wrung out, emptied and exhausted by putting into words feelings which form in my mind at the speed of sound in water as the images rise on the screen.  Awe, amazement, somber recognition, and no small sense of loss and sadness for what befell this great beauty of a ship and those aboard her, they all assail me.  No sea going person could look upon this and not feel for those who rode this behemoth across the Atlantic and then for those who continued aboard on their final journey.  It’s a fear of my own, going down with a ship. To look at this and know that hundreds did just that in this very place, it chills me.

We see the outline of where the bridge once stood, the pedestal of the steering wheel protruding off the deck, strangely untouched yet minus the wheel, it is: that which remains.  A hundred years ago a captain stood here where a room once existed and came to the realization that his charge would not survive the night.  It’s haunting and I feel his sense of dread and loss.  Just behind the steering wheel lies a row of plaques placed by previous expeditions.  They remind me of the artifacts man left on the moon, these not much easier to place.  More memorials, arrayed on one of the most recognized such on earth, a massive sea going mausoleum that has been seen by so few yet shared with so many.  I count myself lucky to be among them, honored to be included. And so I leave this, my plaque inscribed with these written words, dedicated to those whose perished here, and to you, who I hope have enjoyed the trip with me.

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Evan, working through sonar charts to determine best 3D shots

by Michael Dessner

Two things strike you as you enter the lab where the 3D imagery of Titanic is being created.  The first is that everybody in the room is staring rapt at the screens, oblivious to anything you might be doing.  I’m pretty sure that you could walk in there without pants and not get noticed until you got in between someone and the screen. It almost resembles a creepy brainwashed moment when you first see it, everybody staring up all slack-jawed.  The other thing that stands out is that everyone is wearing the exact same pair of sunglasses that look like a pair of light grey polarized sunglasses. These ain’t the old paper cutout, red and blue plastic film lensed glasses you grew up with, nuh-uh.  You could actually walk down a flight a stairs with these bad boys on.  Once you scare up a pair and get them on everything else fades to background and you are transported down 3,700 meters to Titanic.  Live and 3D, in your face, right now. Real.  It’s the kind of sight that will have you feeling around behind you to make sure there’s a place to sit but not actually turn your head to see that there’s a chair there.  It’s the cobra of visual stimulation; you can’t tear your eyes away.

If you could pull your eyes from the screens long enough to take in your surroundings you’d see the most amazing sprawl of technology running around the room along with a spider web of cables, network cables, extension cords and zip ties suspending it all from the ceilings and walls.  There are three primary areas in the imaging lab where the work is done and probably as many smaller stations.  The big draws are the main screens, what everybody is gawping at.  A pair of large, 47″ HD flat screens takes up the ‘front’ of the room (which is actually facing aft).  These are the screens that are monitoring the 3D process, the money shot.  Get in between those and whoever is watching and the popcorn thrown at you will be the least of your problems.  Remember, these are sailors and people working at sea generally carry knives.  OK, it ain’t that bad but nobody wants to miss anything when they are in there.  Polite concern for the feelings of others is a damn good policy when everybody is busting their butts trying to pull together one of the most ambitious deep sea projects ever attempted.

Tony and Evan in the imaging lab between ROV dives.

Underneath the big screens are five smaller screens of varying sizes showing views from the various camera systems mounted on Remora, including its primary piloting cameras.  Each of these cameras is on a pan and tilt device so while the 3D might be looking straight out at the hull there’s likely another camera that is showing the bottom below the vehicle.  Many of these cameras show what the conditions are like at depth, a very different view from Bill Lange’s 3D super sci-fi set.  For some reason, his cameras seem to be less susceptible to the biomass swirling like snow in the currents and over the site.  I’m told by those that know that this particulate matter is likely dead plankton drifting down from higher up in the water column, little creatures that have lived out their lives and are now settling onto the sea floor, future sediment.  I don’t know the precise reason Bill’s cameras seem to be able to see through this better than the other cameras but, they do.  It probably has to do with the custom lighting racks they installed on Remora and says much about the skill set of his engineers.  I’d get into it more in depth but those guys are busy; the last thing they need right now is a former fishpimp asking stupid questions.  I will try and flesh it out a bit more when we make our run for the beach in a few days.

Back to the room, in front of all those screens on the main stage sits one key guy, usually Bill Lange or Evan, who was married on the back deck a couple weeks ago.  Whoever happens to be in that chair is the clearinghouse for a lot of moving parts.  He is interfacing with the ROV operators in the shack two decks down, directing the recording team at the back of the room when to roll tape and working with the navigation team to try and get the cameras where they want them.  All of these folks are relying the data the girls made to help dial in where and how they will work.

Trying to keep your bearings when piloting a device that provides views only through cameras isn’t as easy as it might seem as the visual cues don’t translate well to the human experience.  Abyssal ocean bottom pretty much all looks the same, there ain’t no background except the dark and there’s certainly no sun or moon or any of the things we commonly reference to keep our bearings.  There’s only a compass heading and strings of endless numbers that refer to the cable out, the slant range from the ship to the bottom, depth and other variables that impact their flight over the tangle of steel that was once a ship.

Imagery lab

The navigation guys keep everything sorted out and in perspective.  They are, like everyone else on board, seasoned professionals who have spent years at sea.  They’re contracted to the job via Williamson and Associates and are also the only local guys working the job.  Tony is from St John’s and has been a great guide to the culture and scene in town; he even threw a big barbecue for everyone the day before we took off for the second leg.  Brad is from Halifax.  Both towns boast a long and proud maritime heritage.  I was over at Tony’s house one night for cocktails a few nights before we sailed and a good time was had by all but the highlight for me was when he sang “Barrett’s Privateers“ along with the recording.  At full volume I might add.  Brings a shiver to my spine just thinking about it, a great moment.  His lovely wife Glenda was a perfect hostess; as I got caught up in the shanty, I swear I heard her whisper, “another Newfie born.”  Both Tony and Brad are damn fine shipmates, pros and performing a critical task that I’d explain to you if I understood it better. But I don’t, its real math-y and, heck, I get turned around looking in the mirror.

If you were in the middle of the room looking at the 3D screens up front, Tony or Brad and their 3 nav computers are on the left.  If you looked over your shoulder to the right you would see the recording suite and another huge pile of tech:  Five monster Mac tower computers, seven large computer screens, six smaller monitors, four huge armored computer cases and a couple other stacks of arcane technology that I can only guess at.  There are usually a couple of Bill’s technicians in there; when he tells them to roll tape, they make sure that nothing gets missed.  It is yet another area that eludes me.  Even though they don’t have time to go too deeply into with me it’s enough to know that it’s cool to watch.  They are clearly consummate pros and know their stuff.  As a note: my guest blogger from the other day, best friend to bride Maryann and our lovely wedding planner aboard this trip, Ms. Katherine Rose, works in this section.

So you got three ROV techs in a van a couple decks below running the ROV and winch, a couple techs recording the video as directed on stage right, a navigation guy at stage left advising the ROV team along with the man in front who ramrods the whole bunch.  They are on the stage and they should be, because the video that is coming up is über cool.

Ah man, here I am at my 1,500 word self imposed daily goal and I STILL have not talked about what its like to sit and watch this video.  Now I’m wondering if I should.  A stingy man, a man who wanted to make everyone pay to see what he has earned by sweat equity, would make you go to the nearest IMAX in a year or so and part with a little of your dough-re-mi to watch the show.  I guess I am not that man… I will talk about what its like. But not today. (I know, what an ass…oh well, I’ve heard THAT before).

Actually I have both my girls on the surface right now after a couple fairly hairy boat recoveries and there is such a perfect opportunity to get some sleep before midnight I just cannot pass it up.  We’re taking a little weather this evening and the ship has suspended small boat operations; the girls won’t go back to work again until tomorrow so, what can I tell ya, at heart I am a lazy man who cannot pass up a nap.  Here’s a couple pics to tide you over.

Nighty night from Expedition Titanic.

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<< 20 Hours | The Lab >>

by Michael Dessner

One thing I have come to learn is that I’m a lot happier when the girls are working longer missions.  They have the ability to work 24 hours, roughly 18 hours of bottom time at full depth. On this job, once we finished the overall site survey and switched to the higher frequency and camera runs, we have been working shorter sorties due to the operational profiles, about 14 hours or so.  Do the math on that.  It brings us to three launches and recoveries (each) a day.  While we would normally run 10 to 12 guys on such a job, we only have six out here, including myself, due to space limitations.  That is making for some real grinder hours.  Last night we deployed both Ginger and Mary Ann, finishing up around 2 AM.  With our first recovery slated for just after lunch, a few of us got almost 6 hours of uninterrupted sleep.  It felt like a vacation.

I woke to much calmer seas, the ROV headed down to the site and pizza in the galley.  Super bonus good times.  It’s just after lunch and we are gonna be looking at a couple boat recoveries…

Pilot whales are back, showing an interest in AUVs

Curious Neighbors
Well we did a couple boat recoveries and they were pretty uneventful.  A cool thing about the last couple days has been the Pilot Whales coming back in. Last night as we were getting set up for a ship based recovery a pod came in and clearly followed the vehicles around for a bit as we drove it on the surface to position for a recovery.  As the vehicle maneuvered on the surface they would follow, when it turned toward them they would scatter and then form back up to follow it again.  For the first time they seemed to be ignoring the ship, coming closer than ever before but keeping a pretty steady distance from the vehicle.  Damn cool.  Then this afternoon we did the boat recoveries and the pod seemed to set up just perfectly for pictures off the starboard rail.  I’ve been adding more pictures to my Facebook page about the whales than anything else.  I personally find them completely fascinating.

3am
We put Ginger in about an hour ago and just checked out Mary Ann for a launch which we will do in a few minutes.  I don’t even know what day it is anymore and we are getting just plain goofy.  Since Mark, Andy, Greg and I have the most experience with the equipment, we tend to work together while Fred and Kevin come in to spell us when the vehicles get down to depth; they monitor them while we rest up.  Andy and Greg take quite a bit of additional strain as they have further duties.  Andy is still cranking out mosaics for planning missions which Greg then writes up. But everybody else wants Andy’s product too.  It’s like data crack cocaine.  One hit and 15 minutes later, they’re back for more.  It doesn’t help that the analysis computers are right in the middle of a high traffic area of the ship and that the wireless routers are right next to him as well.  Data processing, IT help, deck ops, questions about this picture, that sonar record, more mosaics, run down to the deck, run crane, hop in a boat and work a recovery, and back to the computers to download 12,000 pictures. Oh, and by the way, have you gone through them to see if we have a picture of the boiler yet?  Poor guy can’t catch a break and yet he very, very rarely loses his sense of humor.  No, he’s usually helping us keep ours.

We’re not going to get a full picture of all the data we’ve collected until operations cease and we can step back for a big picture look.  One thing I do know, if Andy makes up a mosaic of the site and then lays the girl’s tracklines over the top of it, you almost cannot see the data, so thick are the various missions we’ve run.  We are piling up data like crazy, terabytes worth.  That is a helluva lot of sonar data and pictures.  Folks from the imaging lab and navigation come over and ask for something and Andy dives into the pile of bytes and pulls it out of a hat.

Now that the ROV is down below a lot of the tension that had been building during the bad weather has dissipated.  The heads (as I like to call management and ‘experts’) are all smiles but that ain’t getting us any more time in the rack. So when we go out on deck things get plain old silly.  Last night Mark, Andy and I were out there and the rain was coming down in sheets.  I asked Andy if he thought it would rain, he looks up and as the water cascades off his face says, “No, I don’t think it will…”  It seems so silly now but, we all howled with laughter for 20 minutes.  “Yep, not a cloud in the sky..” Which, of course, we can’t see at all.  God, it brings a huge foolish grin to my face just thinking about it.  These guys are such good men, it’s a honor to work with them.  And there is just nothing like cracking up with a bunch of your buddies over the most stupid shit.  Those are moments you remember, not exactly what you were all laughing about just that you were laughing.  In the rain.  With water dripping off your nose, a wet ass and soggy socks.  And your boys.  Sometimes, when you’re feeling it, you ask yourself ‘why the f*#k am I doing this crap?  I’m cold and wet and uncomfortable and I don’t give a crap that everything is working ’cause all I want is an hour off my feet, a nap, a cup of Starbucks and an Egg A Muffin‘.  Then you get a little rest and wake up wondering why your ribs hurt and remember cracking up with your pals the night before.  It’s pretty damn special, and, ya know, Titanic is on the TV just next door, right?

4:30am
Both the girls are working.  “Spirit in the Sky“ is playing on the iPod and I have been promising you a peek into the imaging lab for days now and guess what?  It ain’t gonna happen tonight, either. My ribs hurt and the girls are working and my socks are wet and I could use a shower.  So, my friends, at the risk of making myself a liar in your eyes, I say to you that I am going to see if any of the boys need anything, then go put my rack to good use.

How about another whale picture?  HAHAHAHA!!!

Whew.  I entertain me.  More tomorrow, I promise, I have some pictures of the lab and have been taking notes on how many computers and monitors and people put all that together.  I swear I will do something on it tomorrow.

Promises. Promises.

<< 20 Hours | The Lab >>

<< Late Breaking News | Punch Drunk Love >>

by Michael Dessner

Good morning everybody, it’s been a busy couple days out here on the Jean Charcot and although there’s not many new developments this morning we are gonna catch you up.  First, let’s take a look at the weather, over to you, Al…how does it look?

Well, Mike we’re looking at a low headed into the area, the forecast is calling for 35 knots and building seas with a good chance of rain.  The forecast is for more of the same over the next 24 hours so if you happen to be out on the water looking at, oh, I dunno, say the Titanic, well hey! I’d say batten down your hatches and get ready for a little rockin’ and rolling.  Back to you Mike!

Thanks Al, we sure appreciate you staying on top of that.  We’ll definitely keep an eye on that system as it comes through the area.

And coming through the area it has been.  It’s been a couple days of life in the slop my friends, yes it has.  I had intended to discuss what it’s like to sit and watch some of the video of Titanic coming up into the Imagery lab and I did go in there the other night and make some notes intending to talk about it.  The only problem is that yesterday I had a pretty good story elsewhere so I let it slide, then I looked at my notes and they really weren’t making a lot of sense to me.  I think I’m gonna let it wait (I know, I am such tease).  It has been a couple pretty darn busy days for my guys and the AUV team is running on little fuel after putting in consecutive 20 hour days since we arrived.  I think I am going to just over a little ground reporting on the effort and then see if I can’t grab another hour or two in the rack.  That’s the way it is, work when you need to and try and grab an hour or two when ya can.

So, it certainly seems like longer than a day, day and a half since we pulled our snarl of line and weight up with Ginger.  Since then both the girls have made high freq and picture runs and we’re covering the eastern quadrant of the survey area.  Since the other night we have had a weather system come through that has effectively shut down ROV operations (another reason I want to defer talking about ROV footage, right now we’re not seeing any).  The weather system is a bit lumpy but certainly nothing for the many people following the expedition to be concerned about.  It has temporarily halted ROV operations but the AUV’s continue to work away.

The problem with a sea state above 4 or so on the Beaufort scale is that as the ship heaves in the swell the movement is transferred to the ROV via the tether and can make entanglement and holding position on the site difficult if not impossible.  Launch and recovery of the ROV is also significantly impacted by high seas.  For the AUV’s its nowhere near the issue, primarily due to their untethered aspect: once they are in the water and away they get a few feet below the surface and all is well.  Our problem becomes safety on the surface although conditions have not degraded to the extent that we feel the need to suspend our operations.  I always err on the side of caution when it comes to our personnel and equipment (in that order) so trust me when I tell you we are NOT taking risks out here with either.

I would say that about the worst we have seen has been 20 to 30 knot winds and perhaps 10 to 12 foot seas, with maybe the occasional roller coming through adding another foot or two.  Is it comfortable?  No.  Fun?  Not so much, although it can be damn funny when you’re working on minimal sleep and cracking wise with buddies under similar strain.  Is it dangerous?  Just being here is dangerous but I certainly feel less anxiety about being here than I do zooming down Interstate 5 at 85 mph, bumper to bumper with the rest of Southern California.  It may not seem fun like ‘winning the lottery fun’ but nothing does when you’re in the middle of the grind.  Still, I have no doubt that this expedition will be a highlight of my life.  I will tell stories about this month, ad nauseum, until the dirt hits the lid of my box.

The girls are staying in the spotlight with the ROV grounded due to seas.  I’m sure there is frustration here and there about not being able to get the cameras back down on the wreck but that’s life at sea: you gotta be ready to do what you can if the weather impedes and it is the Grand Bank in autumn, after all.  We’re lucky we ain’t getting our ass kicked worse than this smallish system is doing.  Gear is turning and we’re bringing in lots of good data.  I commented earlier that ‘Greed Kills’ and the folks running this thing know that.  If they pushed the teams to put the ROV over the side before the sea state supported the op and it took one solid roll into the superstructure of the ship, well that would be bad, hmmm?  A couple hundred thousand dollars in cameras and lights along with ROV parts getting hammered into a steel wall would be a damned expensive couple of seconds.

So while the Imaging and ROV teams tweak and wait for their moment to get back in the show the AUV team is working some pretty heinous hours.  We’re all basically putting in 20 hour days (God, how I wish I was exaggerating) and filling up drive after drive with terabytes of sonar data and photos.  As a matter of fact that is something of an issue for us, an embarrassment of riches when it comes to what the girls are putting out.  The guys I’m working with are monsters, they just won’t quit, can’t get ‘em to take a nap, although every once in a while we all will rest our eyes for a second to find an hour gone by.  We’re all a little punchy and apt to laugh too long and hard about the silliest stuff.  It ain’t a foxhole but sometimes it feels like the front lines.

Man I love this stuff.

I think it’s coming down out there.  Lots of grey an occasional rain squalls but the lump is laying down, fewer whitecaps and the wind is easing. We’ve got Mary Ann in the water and Ginger is prepped and in the tube.  We are holding fire on deploying her in the hopes that sometime in the next 6 hours we can get the ROV in the water.  Keeping Ginger on board until we get Mary Ann up will ensure we won’t have to do a boat assisted recovery in the dark if an when the ship goes into Dynamic Positioning mode to support ROV ops.  It’s a safety decision that is frustrating but that we in no way question.  We’re hands down a successful mission right now, one way to change that 180 out would be to hurt someone.  Ain’t gonna happen (knock wood), there’s a lot of salt on the people out here and a fair amount of hard bark and we ain’t gonna screw it up now.

GO TEAM TITANIC!

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by Michael Dessner

0400
I got to bed at midnight last night, completely wrung out tired.  All too soon I hear a knock at my door, I roll over and cover my head with my pillow hoping whoever it is will just go away.  It’s Greg again, quietly informing me I am needed on the deck (he really does have a pleasant bedside manner ;-).  I’m told that Ginger, the vehicle we had just put in a few hours earlier, had aborted due to a time out and was en route to the surface.

The girls have a prearranged set of mission goals and conditions they must meet to continue working on the bottom.  If they do not achieve a goal the clock starts ticking and within a set time period if they still haven’t achieved that goal, whether it be end of line or whatever, they abort, drop their ascent weight and swim to the surface.

In this case, Ginger was working on line 13 of a 60 line, high frequency sonar and still camera mission in the region north of Area 51 (the area east of the wreck with unexplained contacts) when she aborted.  We would not know the exact reason until she got to the surface.

We all grabbed coffee, rubbed the sleep from our eyes and stumbled out into another moonless night.  I had enjoyed a grand total of 2 hours of sleep bringing me up to a two day total of maybe 6 hours.  Andy, Greg and Mark had probably slept even less.  We weren’t loving much of anything as Mark and Kevin grabbed up Mustang suits to head out on the boat (the ROV was still below).  I prepped the back deck while Greg and Andy monitored the situation.  We put the boat out and watched their lights run out into the black night, the incoming weather swell and chop combining with ship movement to turn their lights into a fluttering little ball of St. Elmo’s fire dancing out in front of our rails.

An hour later or so they came back towing Ginger behind them.  The ships orientation in the current was less than ideal, dragging the vehicle across the port aft quarter and forward. In other words, the vehicle wanted to drift under the ship on the left side rather than stream out behind us per our usual recovery routine.  Some quick boat driving by Louise, line handling by Mark and crane driving by Andy all combined to bring Ginger out of the water after a near miss to the stern.  We all breathed a sigh of relief.

Until Andy said, “What the hell is that dragging behind the vehicle?”

It looked like a couple pieces of line hanging from the prop.  The vehicle had become entangled and somehow still made it to the surface.  We were all amazed, something like that at depth can be an AUV killer.  After all there is no cable attache to pull back on if one of the girls gets caught in some bottom obstruction.  When Andy picked the vehicle up higher into the air our amazement grew into astonishment.  It was clear that one end of the line wrapped around the prop was trailing behind the vehicle and being streamed by the current but the other was hanging straight down.  There was some mass there.  Ginger had brought something up with her from the bottom of the ocean.

We got the LARS laid down on the deck and started hauling line, there was definitely some weight to whatever it was.  At one point Greg asked for a knife and Andy handed him his.  He was about to cut the line when I pointed out to him that if he cut the line whatever was hanging off Ginger’s ass it would simply fall back to the bottom taking as much of the polypropylene floating line as was still underwater with it.  It would remain a danger to our vehicle; we needed to get it out of there.  We started hauling line again.  By now a crowd had gathered and we had maybe four guys hauling away building a fair pile of stinky, disgusting, weed encrusted blue line onto the deck.

Greg pointed out that we were likely to be pulling for a long time, “There’s no way that the vehicle could bring this much weight to the surface, we’re likely to be hauling in 3,700 meters of line…”

This prospect did not entice.  That could take a long time, perhaps more than an hour hauling by hand.  We were again looking at the knife and thinking about the expedient measure of just letting her go, yet still pulling, when I heard something clank off the hull below us.  Whatever it was we had it up.  We hauled away.

The line that nearly tied Ginger down

Up over the side came the item, it looked like a clump weight of some kind. It had a couple of red plastic chain links on it and was covered by abyssal slime and mud.  It had even brought a few rocks with it. We were all simply amazed.  Ginger had run into the line floating up from this weight, it entangled into her propeller and held her there.  When her timeout clicked over she aborted and dropped her ascent weight and began the nearly two and a half mile swim to the surface.  We were flabbergasted she made it.  Greg just told me, “OK, here’s the deal.  Our lead ascent weight runs 47 pounds.  The drop weight on the entangled line weighs 42 pounds!”  Those 5 pounds plus her normal buoyancy were all that saved her from being anchored to the bottom.  But for the lack of 5 pounds the Waitt Institute was saved over $1,500,000, the replacement cost for Ginger.

Here’s how that would have played out.  We would have known she aborted and we would have had a fair idea where she was but the only way we would have been able to get her back would have been to send down the Phoenix ROV, Remora, to the area.  That would have taken it off the wreck and all other operations would likely have been suspended.  We would have had a fair to middling chance of finding her and cutting her free but it would have taken days and used up precious time and fuel.  It might very well have ended the expedition.  Thank the fates the girls are such durable and well constructed vehicles.

When asked I have been a Mary Ann guy since the beginning; I’m originally from Iowa and the brunette farm girl always appealed to me.  I’ll let you in on something; I think California has gotten to me a little bit.  I love the beach, the people, the weather; I’m pretty much crazy about living there.  So while I feel I am true to my roots in my work ethic and the kind of person I like to think I am, give me the Movie Star any time!!

OK, we got a little weather. All the gear is aboard for the next day or so.  GOOD NIGHT.

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Ginger came home with the sun this morning.

by Michael Dessner

Last night I made it to my rack around 2330 and didn’t take too long to fall asleep, even after reading a few of the incident reports made to the British investigation of Titanic.  For the first time on this trip I got myself a little creeped out reading the accounts from survivors who spoke of the events that took so many souls in the exact spot where I was currently bobbing around.  It doesn’t do to dwell too much in your head when you’re at sea.  In the past, when I have sat in my bunk and let my imagination run away with me I usually ended up outside, as in no longer confined within the ship.  Late at night it’s all too easy to imagine the hundreds of ways the ocean can claim you, especially if you’re getting kicked around.  This time it was first hand survivor accounts that got me going.  Generally best to just put those kinds of ideations out of your head; not to the extent that you ignore your surroundings and safety, but it’s a short return on imaginings of the various things that can go wrong at sea.  I’ve learned over the years to give my head a shake when ugly thoughts start crawling into my consciousness late at night and so that I did, gave the noggin a rattle and soon enough I was out like a light.

At 0315 my lights came on and I woke to Greg Packard quietly asking me to get up and come down on deck.  Fortunately for all of us the coffee was thick and bitter, many caffeine molecules are required for me to get going on a morning like that.  I like early mornings but after a long day and 3.5 hours of sleep, well, I can be just a tad grouchy.  That’s probably being a bit forgiving on myself, I can be a pure bear sometimes.  This morning, though, things were pretty low key and I had 20 minutes to ease into my waking state.

When I came out on deck to a starry but moonless night, the Bosun from the Jean Charcot was on the bench next to the ship’s launch and she and I sat together and joked over coffee.  Louise is a blond Scottish gal with bright piercing blue eyes and a great sense of humor.  I’ve enjoyed our chats and have admired her capable way, she’s a keen hand with a boat and it’s quite clear she knows her way around a deck.  I know from experience it’s not easy for a female to make her way in the oceangoing community.  The industry is certainly dominated by men and I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I point out that sea going folk may not always be the most open minded of people.  It’s a difficult life: you spend a lot of time away from home and loved ones and conditions are often less than ideal, especially early in your career.  There are certainly those at sea who have run away from some aspect of their former lives, another fair share of those who just don’t care for the masses and it will come as no surprise that many mariners aren’t crazy about change.  For hundreds of years women were actively discouraged from even being on ships much less working them.  Superstitions run thick with sailors and one such was that women were bad luck at sea.  Woes betide the man who would make that argument to Louise.  First she’d rip you a new one verbally; if that didn’t work she’d likely take to doing it physically. Afterwards, she’d demonstrate just how wrong was the prejudice by working circles around you.  She’s a damned fine example of why women should be welcomed into the industry; she’s salty, sassy and seaworthy!  Also, I love the accent.

I would say that yesterday had seen a first in an expedition of this type by simultaneously working two full ocean depth AUVs on the same site that a work class ROV was down working except it ain’t true since we already did that during the first leg!   But since the ship was holding position while the ROV worked we had to make other arrangements for recovering Mary Ann as we would not be able to maneuver the ship per our usual recovery strategy.  Not a big deal for recoveries, we just put the ship’s launch in the water and go find the vehicle on the surface and bring it to us.

Louise and the Chief Mate of the Jean Charcot get the launch up on step.

Lead AUV technician Greg Packard shares a laugh with Bosun from the Jean Charcot, Louise

Joseph gets the launch off the hook at the split second it hits the water

I had initially thought I would be on the boat crew to make the recovery but Mark Dennett and Andy made the first run to grab up Mary Ann.  Conditions were pretty good; we had maybe a four foot groundswell running at an 8 second period, slow and small.  There was almost no surface condition, just a little wind riffle; pretty much ideal. The only drawback was there was no moon so it was dark… real dark.  Still though, as safe an operation as could be; we got a range and bearing from the vehicle when it came to the surface and the ship spotted the strobe right away and lit her up with the spotlight.  Louise and Joseph of the Charcot crew ran Mark and Andy out, they hooked her up, towed her to the ship, tossed us a line and we rigged her into the LARS and brought her aboard.  We had plenty of time to get her stowed, start her data download and have a cup of coffee before Ginger came up for the same procedure.

On the second run I did go out with Mark and the boat crew.  The Jean Charcot launch is a 24 foot Zodiac-type boat, center console, jet drive, hard bottom, inflatable RHIB.  We struggled into our mustang suits, strapped on our life preservers and hopped aboard the boat while still in the davit.  There’s always a touchy moment when you drop a boat into the water like that, you come down onto the water and immediately start rising or falling with the waves.  If you don’t get that rigging undone double quick you run the risk of all the shackles and hooks crashing around inside the boat as you rise or the wave can drop out beneath you and everything snap loads back onto the rigging.  It’s a real good way to lose a finger.  Joseph’s every bit the pro as Louise, however, and it’s clear they’ve done this hundreds of times together.  We were away without incident.

Gathering up Ginger was pretty simple, we got next to her and dropped our transponder fish, sent her a command to release her recovery float then back down to expose her recovery line.  Grabbed that up, tied it into a line for towing and started the slow haul back to the Charcot. The seas were friendly and the sun was just pinking up the sky as we easily towed the vehicle back to the stern of the ship.  We were all quietly digging the moment; I was sitting next to Louise and she casually leaned over and quietly said to me, “I dinnae like to go so slow”.  I don’t doubt it, never met a bosun yet who don’t like putting their boats through the paces, but, as my old Canadian guide used to say, “Slow and steady wins the race, b’y.”

The Jean Charcot, viewed from the small boat during an AUV recovery.

The girls came up with good data and pictures, our high frequency sonar imagery is everything we’d hoped for and is going to be a great boon to the camera and ROV teams methodically working the site.  I won’t go on about it; hopefully soon we will release some of those images.  I had also commented on how I was not going to talk too much about the video Bill Lange’s cameras were pulling up, but I can’t resist the temptation any longer.  So it is that tonight I plan to sit in the lab and make some notes. Tomorrow I’ll try to give you all a feel for what it’s like to sit surrounded in high definition 3D footage of the most famous shipwreck in history.

Until then, signing off as
simply, Dessner.

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Last night

by Michael Dessner

It really is hard to put too fine a point on waking up to find near perfect conditions during a deep sea voyage.  This morning when I rose to find the sun shining through the porthole in my stateroom I leisurely grabbed a shower and cup of coffee and took a stroll on the back deck.  Both the girls were already pre-flighted, weights installed, lines packed, almost trembling in the gate to get back into the race.  Mark Dennett of the WHOI AUV team had pulled out a couple of his folding camp chairs and was sitting on the stern watching the ocean go past.  The skies were light blue with very few high clouds, the sun shining down on an ocean that had settled some overnight, just a lazy 3 foot ocean swell.  You just could not ask for a nicer day (knock wood, a comment like that is almost certain to bring a weather change).

Yesterday saw some progress on the processing side of things.  Andy had put together a really sweet mosaic that was based on his pulling out snippets of sonar data and then laying onto a canvas in Photoshop.  I personally have never been able to make head nor tail of that program, having not attended the 4 semesters of study it seems to require.  Fortunately for us, one of the new AUV guys from Woods Hole, young master Kevin, is fairly proficient with the program and he has been able to smooth the transitions between the various layers.  It’s smoking hot now. Soon, I hope we’ll be able to share some of this data with the world at large.  Mary Ann and Ginger are such capable platforms for underwater work.  In essence they have exponentially decreased survey time by two orders of magnitude; but, that amazing stat means nothing if they cannot bring back excellent data. If anyone still has their doubts I assure you when you see the imagery they’re creating on the Titanic you will be convinced: it’s dramatic. One of my personal hopes was to create magazine cover quality sonar imagery of this site, the most recognized shipwreck on earth, and I am comfortable that we have done so already.  Tomorrow when the 540 kHz data comes up we will have gone even farther down that road.

1000
Once we arrived on site we dropped a topside transducer to wake our Deep Ocean Transponders and reactivate our Long Baseline navigation grid down on the wreck.  These DOTs have been resting comfortably on the ocean floor since we left a week ago; they woke right up and are in place to provide the girls references when they get to the bottom and begin work.  All Systems are GO FOR LAUNCH!  To the deck and launch stations!

An AUV in the LARS being held snug by the operator.

1100
Seldom do you get to work on deck in a nearly flat sea with the sun beating down on you, especially on the Grand Bank!  Instead of our foul weather gear we’re reaching for sunblock.  We just worked a near flawless launch, having only to slow the ship down just a tad to keep communications with the vehicle as it was streaming behind the ship.  But aside from that completely negligible aspect, it was a picture perfect deployment; a good thing since I was running the hydraulics on the LARS. When things go pear shaped, that can be a slightly tense place to stand, a spot where we have seen some strange things in the past.

During our early operations we had a couple incidents of the vehicles activating when they hit the water and swimming to catch back up with the ship instead of streaming behind us.  Even though we have long since fixed the software glitch that caused that, you need to be ready for it.  Another difficulty we have seen is the line used to deploy the vehicles back-spooling onto the winch on the LARS.  While the vehicle is in the water and streaming behind the ship, we let out a couple hundred feet of line before attaching the descent weight and releasing the vehicle to dive to the bottom.  That can slack and wrap around the drum; then instead of spooling out, it starts to suck the vehicle back in.  A very unpleasant occurrence.  If you are running the winch, you have a tendency to be looking at the vehicle and line, you can’t really see the winch drum.  If the vehicle suddenly starts coming back at you, that can be a damned confusing moment.  Time to break and go get Mary Ann in the water.  To the deck!

Ginger at the surface, ready to dive. (Waitt Institute file photo)

1430
OK, Mary Ann is also away.  We had a little moment back on deck during this launch. Usually just before you boom out the LARS over the stern, pressure must be maintained on the winch line to keep it tight as the LARS goes from horizontal to vertical and the vehicle goes from laying on the cart to hanging in the air.  Seldom is that line wound so tight that a ton suddenly depending from it doesn’t pull out a little slack.  The result?  The vehicle drops from 6 to 18 inches, enough to get your blood moving, trust me.  It’s not actually a problem.  You just suck it back up tight into the docking head and then finish booming out over the water, winch out, get the vehicle streaming behind the ship for final checks and release.

When I brought in the slack from the descent line today, the chain that is locked to the nose of the vehicle with titanium levers and solenoid releases, popped out!  Mary Ann, sensing that her descent weight had been released, started swimming to her first objective so her prop started turning.  The only problem was that she was still in the LARS 3,700 meters above the sea floor (or, 4 meters above the water!).  It wasn’t a really big deal.  We carefully removed the recovery float and the recovery line box, reinserted the decent chain. Tested, reinserted. Tested again.  When we were satisfied that it had just not been properly loaded in the first place, we put everything to right and got ready to launch.

However, I had just spent the last half hour living in my head, thinking about what would have happened if we had not caught the problem.  In my imagination, I can see the LARS up at a 70 degree angle but still over the deck when the vehicle slid out of the docking head.  Most likely it would have bounced overboard with little damage would be done.  But in my paranoid state, I got to wondering what would happen if it fell half overboard and then canted with the nose down toward the deck.  With the LARS in an upright position, we may have been in a hairy spot at that point.  They’re double tough but, bouncing them around on the deck of a ship at sea ain’t my idea of a good time (or a cheap date)!

Anyway, we got everything ready for launch, with me again at the hydraulic control pedestal running the LARS.  When I had the vehicle up to about 70 degrees off the deck, it did what it usually does which is drop a bit.  Although only about a foot, it seemed like a lot farther and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t scare the crap out of me.  But, like I said last week, never let them see you sweat. I eased off the ‘Boom Out’ control so I could have a bit more hydraulic oomph and sucked her back up tight into the docking head with the winch.  Everything else was 5 by 5.  Ginger is on the bottom doing her thing and in about an hour Mary Ann will join her. We have secured our surface transponder and are turning the boat over the ROV guys.  I am going to stay away from the coffee until the jitters leave my system, grab a camera and watch the ROV guys do there thing on this beautiful day at sea.

Until tomorrow, when I’ll be raving about the new high freq sonar, this is Dessner, out.

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Indeed

by Michael Dessner

It got done: a major deep sea expedition actually left a day early.  It’s a pretty buff muscle move and, as I mentioned yesterday, no gig I’ve ever worked on has been able to pull it off (or even tried that I can recall).  Last night we were one shy of a quorum when we piled into the vans and headed downtown for one last episode of dinner and drinks in downtown St. John’s.  We’d spotted a pretty good 24 hour Irish restaurant earlier in our explorations and returned to Talamh am Eisc for one more round and one more steak before heading to sea.  As we were wrapping up a text came into my Bberry and we knew that our last guy had hit the tarmac, that we had our dance card filled and would be ready to roll when we got back to the dock.  Back we went; we weren’t on board ten minutes before the deckies started pulling the gangplank and getting busy to get to open water.  By the time the sun was fully down we were at sea.

There was just the slightest lump when we got out, probably running close to 10 foot seas once we got shed of the lee of the island.  Nothing extreme, mind you, just enough to let you know you were no longer in your hotel bed.  It’s something you get used to, rolling in your bunk as the ship wallows through waves.  I’ve been in 50 footers in the Bering Sea where you don’t so much lay down to sleep as wedge yourself into your bunk using your elbows and knees into the corners of your bed frame.  Rest in those conditions is really more a matter of a survival function; you drift in and out but don’t really get any sleep.  It won’t kill ya but after a couple days of that tempers tend to get short.  Much of the comfort of the ride depends on where the seas are running: if you’re traveling parallel to the waves (”in the trough”), the ship is really going to move around a lot as the waves pass below you and you roll with them.  Take big water on the nose and you’re gonna get slammed up and down pretty badly.  If you’re lucky you’ll end up with fair winds and following seas but in the event of that rare condition not being the case, a good skipper will generally quarter the seas, slice into them at an angle.  Usually bunks run parallel with the ship’s keel to help you keep in bed but sometimes even that won’t help.  One memorable occasion the ship I was working on took a bad roll from what was probably a rogue wave, I tumbled out of bed and my entire bookshelf of some 50 books dumped itself onto my head as I lay on the floor.  It was get mad or laugh so I laughed, alone in my room in the middle of the night, like a madman.  Then I wrote a poem about it, thankfully lost to time (it was terrible).

But I digress.

We got through the night with no difficulty and everyone woke to the sight of the deep blue in all directions, as far as the eye could see. It seemed the weather had changed a bit, less low lying stuff in the skies and some higher clouds that are probably remnants from the hurricanes.  It seems colder and breezier but certainly not difficult conditions.  I am hearing that we may run into a little weather in a few days, peaking around the 11^th, but again, nothing too dramatic, may not even impact our operations (knock wood).

Everybody got straight to it.  Andy dug into his mosaics and multi-beam data with various team mates coming by asking to see this or that as they contemplated their plans.  The camera techs got to tweaking and tuning up, both the AUV and ROV teams checked and double checked their equipment.  Greg Packard, the head of the AUV team, did some tests of the high frequency sonars that had been loaded into Ginger to make sure they were working and also installed some new hard drives that will make it easier for us to download the copious files that the cameras on the AUV’s produce.  We installed a new RAID drive onto the Analysis System that more quickly backs up our data and in general the conversations started to turn to planning for our last leg on the site.  Aside from those activities the other thing on everybody’s minds was tuning up the satellite Internet connection which has been spotty much of the time.  I’m glad to say that we seemed to have dialed that in nicely as well.  Just 5 years ago such connectivity was rare and expensive at sea but we have all gotten used to the improvements and are loathe to relinquish them.  It looks like we actually found the problems and solved them (much better than fixing something but having no idea why).

Once everyone settled into their computers and the work began to progress the department heads met for a planning meeting.  It was an excellent gathering and the plan is in place.  Upon arriving on site the AUV’s will be deployed first. Ginger has the very high frequency sonar for high resolution, short range runs that will produce the most dramatic sonar imagery of Titanic ever created, hands down.  We will also be configuring the AUVs to take pictures and run the downward looking multi-beam units.  The ROV will be deployed again with Billy’s HD 3D cameras and they will begin at the bow then move towards the stern to continue mapping the site optically.  There is another debris field to the east of the primary site that was referred to as Area 51, we just don’t know what’s over there.  That will be looked at when the bow and stern have been covered, time permitting.  It’s a damn smart group of people running this thing of ours, some of the best in the world and they got a plan for the dive; soon it will be time to dive the plan.

Taking a walk around deck today as we steam towards the grounds I am again filled with admiration for just how squared away things seem.  All of the detritus we began with, welding rods and chunks of metal from our frantic mobilization, crates still looking for a home and gear still being worked on, all of that is gone and all the work spaces are tight and cleared.  The difference is subtle but will have an impact when we get to work.  The new guys on board will benefit from the experience of those returning and all of us are looking at fairly well known quantities: the gear, the ship and most of the people have been here before and we KNOW it all works.  Now we work it.

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A happy day at sea

by Katherine Rose

The Story Begins
Maryann and Evan first met 5 years ago on another Titanic Expedition in August of 2005.  At this point they were both working for different organizations, but soon after Evan accepted a position at the same WHOI imaging lab where Maryann worked. They were both in relationships but began a working friendship over the next few years. As so often happens, their outside relationships didn’t work out and they found themselves single.  Working in this type of field there are long hours, stressful situations combined with exotic, beautiful shooting locations and once-in-a-lifetime moments. Their close friendship grew into love and about a year later, they moved in together, bought a house and a boat (sans engine, but who’s counting).

The Engagement
Evan was unsure when he wanted to propose, but he knew he wanted it to be sometime during this trip because it was 5 years ago on a similar expedition to Titanic that they met. As can happen during hurricane season, the weather turned and a string of hurricanes forced us off the site and back to St. Johns. During our last night out at sea on the trip back home, I saw Evan and Maryann gather up their jackets and head outside. I figured they were just taking advantage of a brief moment to break away from work to have some time together.  I didn’t notice how long they were gone, but I did notice something different when they returned. From where I sat, I could see Maryann beaming, looking starry-eyed up at an equally happy Evan.  They casually entered the lab where a few of us were attending to various tasks. Maryann caught my attention from across the room, raised her hand and stealthily pointed to her newly acquired ring.  I was overjoyed but had to keep it together so as not to alert the entire room and, most importantly, our boss.  Luckily, I didn’t have to contain it long. They told a few others sitting nearby and the news quickly spread from there. In fact, one of the independent videographers made an announcement to the room without realizing that Maryann’s and Evan boss was sitting right there. They had hoped to privately share their news over a beer with him but fate let him know just as it did everyone else.  Maryann and Evan are well-loved by everyone they meet and so it did not take long for the great news to travel around the ship. People started coming up to the lab to congratulate them.  At some point, someone even jokingly suggested that the captain could marry them while at sea.  To everyone’s amazement, neither of them voiced any objections - Evan even seemed excited by the idea -  and so an impromptu morning wedding was quickly set in motion.  Hours of celebrating, toasts and photos lasted well into the night.  The captain generously brought out his personal stash of champagne to share with the couple.

The ring

The ceremony

"You may kiss the bride"

Preparations
As you may expect, they are laid back and simply happy to share a special moment with new and old friends.  But Maryann is my best friend, so I wanted to try to put something special together.  I gathered a few helpers and left the festivities to search the ship for possible supplies.  I pulled out a few nice tops but all we had were jeans and dirty work pants to wear. On a long-shot, I headed to the linen room and pulled down a single white bed sheet.  I had a small travel sewing kit, a bed sheet and a cashmere scarf I found in my bag. With these small beginnings - and a little help from me - I felt secure that Maryann could make even this look beautiful.

With the dress settled on, I headed upstairs where several others were working on making a paper flower bouquet. It was truly a collaborative effort with everyone helping to cut out the flower shapes, color them, tape them on to tie wraps and color all the tie wrap stems green.  Ryan, another coworker from the lab, even made Evan a matching flower boutonnière. And I have to give special thanks to Tony, from the ROV team, who created some beautiful tissue carnations.  We used one as the centerpiece in the bouquet and used the rest as backdrop decorations for the wedding location. We fashioned a sort of garland from strips of white paper and colored scraps of a very expensive insulating tape (sorry Bill!)  Mark, another videographer, offered his blue dress shirt for Evan to wear and even gave it some time in the shower to steam out any wrinkles.  The kitchen staff gave us some rice from their stash and small cups to hand out to everyone.  Most importantly, Tim and others from the ROV team fabricated a ring for Evan from pieces of the ROV umbilical.  At this point I think it was about 3am. The wedding was set for 9am and, satisfied with our efforts, we all headed to bed.

The Wedding
After a late night of celebrating, Maryann and I woke up early and started getting ready. I had a few more details to attend to, so I left her in the room to compose some vows. I found Evan already up and dressed. I spoke with the professional videographers, now turned wedding photographers, Ryan and I added all the decorations to the bow, and I made a few finishing touches to the bouquet. Everyone got dressed up and the crew wore their uniforms. Shortly before 9am, we were several miles off the coast of Newfoundland and all gathered on the bow, cameras and rice in hand.  The morning started out cool and foggy, but amazingly, just before the wedding, the sun came out and it turned into one of the most beautiful days we have had.  Evan was up front with the captain, who was conducting his first wedding. Maryann arrived, looking radiant in her bed sheet dress, and walked our makeshift aisle as the crowd hummed the wedding march. The captain began.  He made the declaration, Evan and Maryann shared their vows and exchanged rings - and just like that were married.  They stayed around the bow, receiving congratulations and taking photos.  It couldn’t have been more perfect with a ship full of professional camera equipment, videographers and photographers.  Despite being thrown together in mere hours it really was a beautiful ceremony.

(Guest blog submitted by Katherine Rose of the Advanced Imaging and Visualization Lab at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.  Thanks so much, Kat. Dessner)

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by Michael Dessner

9.04.2010 early
I’d have to say that I am itching to get back to sea. Looking down on the ship from my 4th floor hotel room it looks battle ready, no one moving around deck at this early hour. A kilometer away she looks pretty shiny white and all the gear looks dogged down for combat. Loaded for bear. I guess one sweet side effect of strapping everything down for a hurricane is that when you come back from a trip Outside (as we would have said in my AK days) everything is ready for sea. No rushing around last minute tying stuff down.

I’d really prefer it though, to be rushing around right now. Gonna go find some make work for myself. I’d go for a drive in the country; but, so far I’ve been able to avoid the expense of renting a car and it seems foolish to do it now. Regardless, I’m mentally geared to be away from the beach and after a couple days sampling the various local fares (read as ‘checking out the many different Irish pubs around town’) and a day in my hotel room catching up on correspondences and non mission related work, I want to be doing something. Wonder if they rent bicycles in town?

Who’m I kidding? Headed down to the ship to find some make work for myself. Make work; something I detest almost as much a standing around waiting for something to happen. As Aubrey would have said, I must make “the choice between the lesser of two weevils” (yeah, OK, I watched Master and Commander last night in the room. Thank Poseidon I have been able to resist having “H O L D   T I G H T” tattooed across my knuckles). In all my years of working you simply would not believe the sheer number and unpleasantness of some of the disgusting, skuzzy tasks I have engaged in just because some supervisor decided to keep us occupied. Make work pays the bills but it seems to do so at the expense of the happy segments of the human soul. I would say it’s a morale killer but the other weevil, inaction, is even worse.

There’s a fair mount of activity amongst those that were left behind. The camera team from Billy Lange’s Advanced Imaging and Visualization Lab (AIVL) out of WHOI are hard at it, looks to me like they pulled a fair number of their bottles and are now remounting them, oil-comping those housings that need it. Everybody that’s around is keeping busy with something and when all else fails you grab a paint brush, by and large everything looks like we’ll be good to go when everyone returns. Signing off.

9.05.2010
Took a walk down to the boat this morning and its darned quiet. Looks like the all the prep work is done, the cameras are all back on the Remora, the labs upstairs look tidier than ever before. It’s the calm before the storm, both literally and figuratively. The word I got from most of the boys back on the east coast yesterday was that the hurricanes were moderate, good sized storm but no real carnage. I asked Mark Dennett of the WHOI AUV team if he took any damage. He said, “Yep, found a leaf in the dog dish, had to empty his water and refill”. Not the fury they expected I take it. Looks like we will be spared here in St. Johns too, sun’s shining and the wind is blowing out of the east but that’s about it. Gonna work on other projects for the day. Can feel it coming though, can tell that there are people in the air headed our way. Current schedule is for us to leave Tuesday morning and be back on the 18th. Get my tickets squared away and I should be back at my desk in San Diego on the 21st. I’m out. Gonna work in my room for a few hours and get to bed at an early hour, sync up.

9.06.2010 0600
Woke up on my favorite schedule this morning; up at 5:15 or so, just as the first light is touching the horizon. Looks to be a clear day but there’s a breeze stirring. Have been shuttling my stuff from the hotel room to my berth on board the ship so each walk to the boat is laden with a full backpack. All my laundry’s clean, got all my other jobs lined out with the various entities I’m dealing with and am looking forward to the boys showing up. Have a text message from a couple of the AUV team, a few of them seem to have gotten in around 11:15 last night and sent me a note asking if I wanted to meet them for a late supper. Thankfully I was in bed which is how I am on my normal work schedule. Feels good to be up before the sun, looking down at the ship that will be taking me to Titanic tomorrow! Here it comes, the excitement of heading back out to a site we already have dialed in to some degree.

1000
Oh yeah, the teams are showing up on board and everybody is frosty to get back on the water. The WHOI boys are here and we’re starting to prep the girls for deployment. A different set of higher frequency sonar transducers are going into the girls for an even higher resolution survey of the site. That imagery is gonna rock even more than the super rock star stuff we got already. Wish I could share but we’re still working the data and plan to shine it up even more with some new runs past the wreck. It’s coming and it will be fabulous. We’ll do a quick dunk test, get ‘em wet and just make sure everything’s still dialed in. As well the AIVL folks on Billy Lange’s team from WHOI are doing some last minute touch ups on gear, the Phoenix guys are reassembled in full and everybody has the glint in their eye. Ready to hit open water.

The word is circulating that we may get out early. Now, ya gotta love that. I’m certain I have NEVER been on a job where we got out early. It’ says a lot about this group, their professionalism and dedication, that not only can they get to sea a day early but are chomping at the bit to do so. No one cares that we won’t have a night out together in town; we’ve been there and done that in St John’s. It’s a great place to work from but work is what we wanna do. We get out to the site a day early and that’s one more day’s work we put in, that much more we can accomplish and that much more data we bring back. It’s a win, win, win. And it’s looking good.

So I have come back up to my hotel room at the Quality Hotel Harbourview and am gathering up my gear. Damned glad I made a run this morning, just about everything still left in here will fit in my backpack. I feel like I’m leaving a place I’ve gotten to know pretty effectively. My window looks down over the harbor with a straight shot to the entrance and I have been getting the feel for the rhythm of this place, watching the various workboats in and out, both oil support ships and the local fishing boats which all remind me of a class of ship we knew as “the Petersburg” boats when I was pimping fish in Alaska. I’ll remember the view from this room but I’d be lying if I said I’ll miss it. I’m ready to roll, glad to go. This job will be more fun than any week on the beach.

The next one will come from the water. Operations!!!

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The Jean Charcot rests comfortably back in her berth while the crew readies for the next leg.

By Michael Dessner

Having your expedition cut short by weather is not a lot of fun. Aspirations that have been building for years are funneled into planning over months and months to pull all the necessary personnel and pieces of equipment together and the little details are astronomical in number. When it all comes together, it’s like a soufflé. Get the temperature wrong, add just a little bit too much of this or that, heck, look at it too hard and the thing will fall flat. When ya get it up and running the very last thing you want to do is shut it down for a week, no matter the reason. So many things can go wrong at that point. What if one of your key guys (and we have a few) has a scheduling conflict that cannot be avoided? The ship has a schedule and shoving everything back a couple weeks isn’t always a viable option. And then there’s the cost. 30 people flying home or spending a week in hotels? It ain’t hard to imagine the fiscal impact. I would say that Chris Davino, the president of RMS Titanic, has taken it in stride and with exceptional professionalism and aplomb. He has experience with water based operations from his early fishing days so he totally gets it and never once frowned at the reality of 2 hurricanes barreling down directly onto his meticulously planned project, but everything has a bottom line and his can’t help but be affected. Still, he didn’t miss a beat or hesitate. “Damn good job, do what ya gotta do and be back in a week” pretty well sums up his response to us regarding the situation. And that will happen with this mission, nobody wants to leave and watch it on TV. With few exceptions, everybody had to fight and scratch for a berth on the Jean Charcot; nobody is voluntarily giving one up, come hell or high water (which might fairly well describe your average hurricane).

As I alluded to in an earlier post, the break does allow us to get some pretty seriously needed work done. The down time gives us a chance to deal with some generator/power issues that cropped up late in the first leg; we can tune in our sat comms which won’t be a bad thing at all. Andy Sherrell, who is crunching data, can get some ducks in a row. By and large the expedition will be improved by the time out. When gather together this time we’ll know our gear is burned in, the teams know the drill on deployments and recoveries, everybody knows where to step to avoid getting caught in the bight and we’re now a group of colleagues who have effectively interacted with each other. I hazard a not-so-amazing prediction that when everybody comes together in a few more days that it will be like long lost friends reuniting. There will be lots of hugs and happiness and everybody will be energized to go get it done. Rested and coming back onto a ship where their gear is already stowed, equipment already rigged for sea and ready to roll. The transit out will probably the worst part, they’ll all hit the dock running and then have to settle in for a 36 hour transit, best guess is that by the time we get there everyone will be chomping at the bit to perform.

A lot of folks have gone home for a few days. Not many people working this job can afford to remain idle for a day or two, much less a week. Most of the AUV operations team went back to Woods Hole; they are very busy guys who have a lot of irons in the fire all around the oceanography community. I’ve stayed behind to keep an eye on the gear and run down anything they might need feet on the ground to handle. I am pretty comfortable anywhere with a laptop and my Blackberry so I can handle my duties relatively easily as long as I have an internet connection. Andy stayed behind a couple days to keep working data but he’s got a few commitments he can deal with so he’ll go home tomorrow morning, early. One of the Phoenix guys who already works a grueling schedule will fly home for a couple days to bounce his kids on his knee. He’s got a crack team lined out, a testament to their capabilities that he can head out for a brief visit with his loved ones. And Billy’s team is pretty much all still here. Those guys are running some cutting edge technology that seems like its getting invented as they go along. Mad scientists on wheels, those cats, it’s doctoral level tech tweaking.

St John's lit up Thursday night with a beautiful sunset offset by the lights from workboats and a cruise ship.

So here we are, in St John’s Newfoundland, waiting for the storm, kinda keeping fingers crossed it dissipates or turns course so folks don’t have to come back up here and fix stuff. The decision to hit the road was the right one no matter how you cut it, you can’t second guess a storm that might come on and whip up 40 foot waves. Tough to do much other than survive in seas of that nature, definitely not gonna get any work done if you have to tie yourself into your chair and then bolt that to the floor so you can hunt and peck through the bungie straps keeping your computer from turning into a projectile. I was in the Bering Sea once on a 330 foot ship taking 30 foot seas and watched a microwave oven fly across the room; it was like the thing hopped off the counter and took a ballistic trip 20 feet across the galley. We all sat stunned for a second, trying to decide if we should laugh or take cover. We all got up, picked up our coffee and wet napkins and then headed to check out the rigging on all the appliances that had not yet learned to fly (sailors trick, if you’re in big seas and you want to put a cup of coffee on a smooth surface and not have to watch it slide off the table, take a napkin and set it under your cup then dribble some liquid onto it as you set the cup down, sticks it there nicely). Running from weather is always the smart thing to do if you can afford it and when making that decision it’s always best to remember a maxim of work on the water: Greed Kills.

Soon enough I will be hanging with just a few new friends, all of my longer acquaintances having gone home to attend their career needs or families. When I’m not on my computer in my hotel room or puttering on board with the gear or analysis computers I am hoping to do a little more prowling around the area, get a look at some of the countryside. As always I will have my camera and will try and learn a little bit of something new to share in my posts. Right now its midnight and Andy is still in front of his computer while I keep him company and do a bit of writing in the quiet of a ship whose crew is enjoying a little liberty. I’m gonna check in with him and see about shutting it down so he can get a couple hours of sleep before his 6 AM flight. I think an 18 hour shift from him is a fair enough piece of work for one day.

Ah yes, one last thing, Kat, the young lady who acted as wedding planner for the nuptials held on board the other day, has agreed to write up the story of Maryann and Evan, our bride and groom (no relation to Mary Ann the AUV :-). Hopefully I can get that out to you in a day or two. It should be worth the wait. Cheers!

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The entrance to St. John's, Newfoundland, by sea

The lighthouse at St. Johns, Newfoundland, one of the oldest in North America

By Michael Dessner

Once the gear was on board the night of the 28^th we bugged out in advance of Danielle but I hazard if you weren’t on deck you’d have hardly noticed as far as the ride goes.  The first thing you realized was the ship had evened out, not bopping around as much as it does when it’s station keeping for operations.  Pretty big difference between maintaining a heading underway, a repetitious rise and fall as you travel the waves at 10 knots, versus occasionally wallowing in the slop when holding position or drifting during Ops.

When the ROV is on the wreck the ship is constantly using its dynamic positioning (DP) capabilities to stay in the exact spot the Phoenix guys tell it to be in.  Try doing that using only 2 screws, even with variable pitched props, double tough if not impossible.  You’re fighting ocean swell, winds (and resultant surface seas) then top it all off with current; it’s an easy bout to lose for a couple seconds and that’s all it takes sometimes for things to go wrong.  DP uses 2 (ea.) bow and stern mounted thrusters to try and bore a 5 meter hole in the ocean.  It’s quite cool.  And necessary; the ROV operators are holding position over a site that sticks up tens of meters from the ocean floor.  Titanic is a jagged, hundreds of tons anchor just waiting for anything unfortunate enough to get entangled in the rusticle covered wreckage.  And the ROV team is not just floating Remora over the site looking down; they’re running it up and down the sides, looking at the bottom surrounding the hull, lots of different moves as they ‘map’ it with Billy’s smoking hot 3D cameras.  It’s a thing of beauty when it’s going on, but, as you’ll likely hear me say again and again about many things, it ain’t easy.

ROV descent lights, viewed from above

Currents are a major variable.  They can run in different directions at different depths. When you consider that you’re working 4 kilometers down on the end of a tether and the only two things you can control are the position of the ship (mostly) and how you fly the vehicle using thrusters to fight against bottom current, it’s a solo dance at the end of a very long line amidst a whirlwind of variables.  It’s not at all the same but a decent enough analogy might be trying to dangle a washer on a string out of your fourth floor hotel room window and hovering it directly next to a soda can laying on the sidewalk below.  I am going to do a little more sniffing around Phoenix operations, pester the boys a bit and write some more about this.  It’s fascinating.

And sometimes a little scary.  Everybody loves you when you got it all going on but sometimes when you’re hanging your string in the wind over a tangle of steel  4 klicks down you can get a little hung up.  Then it gets real quiet in the labs.  Soon nonessential personnel start leaving.  Then it’s damn quiet everywhere.  The pilots are keeping their cool but if they ain’t sweating it internally, they ain’t human. At the end of the day, everybody has fall asleep alone in their head.  But the measure of a true professional is keeping your cool when it hits the fan; that’s how you get the job done.  Never let them see ya sweat because that shit is contagious.  You move the boat this way and that, drive the vehicle here and there, look around, understand what’s happening and why… and fly that bad boy out of trouble.  That’s the gig: high power underwater explorer space ship piloting with your contrail a potential anchor tail.  When the vehicle is free and the cheering stops it’s just the end of another day.  You wait until you’re on the beach in the bar with your boys before you let anyone know it had your pucker factor up and then it’s all laughs, good natured hard core ribbing and slaps on the back.  The Phoenix guys ROCK.

Once the girls were in their huts and Remora was on deck, we dogged it all down and headed to town in advance of the hurricane.  At the beginning of a transit home everybody hustles to make sure they’re gear is tied down so nothing rolls around and damages personnel or gear, then usually everyone heads for the rack.  You shed the tension of the job, start looking forward to town and for the next 36 hours you take care of processing and lining out your next moves.  The busiest people on board at this time are the analysts.  They’re caught up handling all the requests from their team mates so the planning can go forward.  We have multi beam data that needs to be processed.  Mosaics of sonar imaging in two frequencies that need to be made, smoothed, cleaned and tweaked.  14,000 photos, each representing a 7 meter square of bottom that need to be made into a map (if you printed each one onto a standard piece of paper and strung them together the resultant map would be roughly the size of 5 football fields)

Most of that is falling to Andy Sherrell.  He’s doing a helluva job.  When this is over ask Chris Davino, Dave Gallo, Jim Delgado, Billy Lange if they got all they asked of Andy and more, I know the answer already.  But it’s tough when they ALL want something within the next 1 hour.  Buggin’ out for the beach; he’d never admit it being happy about it but he wouldn’t deny the providence.  And that just ripples out to every one who’s waiting for that data.  They all get it, done right, in time to plan for a few days before ops most likely.  When we get back out to there this group is gonna be a well oiled machine.

Everything I discussed above has only to do with our data and how it will interact directly with the ROV operations.  How this will all fold into the overall product we are working towards making is hard to comprehend. If I understand it correctly, Billy’s HD 3d footage will be “draped” on top of the 3D representations that will eventually be produced by the data we are collecting.  It’s going to be a crazy conglomeration of datasets that should be something new, something never before seen.  It will really be a 3D, interactive, scientifically accurate visual representation of the wreck.  Add that one to the “Never Been Done Before” list of this expedition, right after concurrent AUV and ROV operations.

Wow, two posts that start at the beginning of the transit and I still don’t have us halfway to the beach yet.  Sorry, guess you’ll have to wait another day for it.  But do read on.  We left on the evening of the 28^th and arrived on the morning of the 30^th and the 36 hours in between were highly entertaining; like no other transit I’ve been on.  I am going to see if I can get one of the WHOI camera techs to guest blog and tell the story of the romance that swept up the ship on the way into town.

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By Michael Dessner

This morning when I woke up the sun was shining, the Remora ROV was on Titanic making 3D video and Mary Ann had just come to the surface. It seems like just another sentence but man, its pretty damn seldom that everything works out to that extent. Normally I wouldn’t even point it out, we ocean going types are a superstitious lot and seldom tempt fate by crowing obvious triumphs of this sort but we have temporarily suspended operations so in this case I will make an exception.

Greg Packard and Kevin Manganini make one last check of the transducer box before loading it into the small boat for a recovery of the AUV.

Usually we need the ship to be under way for us to recover the AUV’s. The process goes a bit like this: We get notice from the vehicle on the bottom that she has finished her survey. We program the missions so we know generally how long they  last,we know how long it takes the vehicles to reach the bottom and then swim back up when they are done but there can be complicating factors to the total bottom time. For instance if a vehicle is encountering a lot of terrain its collision avoidance scenarios tend to slow it down. Or it might be coming up against a strong current which will affect traveling time. Finally, if the vehicle is dumping a lot of juice into sensors this can  chew through battery time quicker than anticipated. We monitor the vehicles at all times using a transducer on the surface that receives bursts of data on basic vehicle condition: orientation, range, depth, altitude, information on any faults that might be present. When they leave the bottom we know and are ready for them.

Generally they come up to the surface, call us on the Iridium net with their position and start flashing a strobe. We move the ship toward the vehicle and when we’re close we get it on wireless and take ‘manual’ control. We steer the ship on a parallel course, get it about 25-40 yards off to one side (starboard) and then give it a command to release a recovery float from its nose. If this happens with no issue we tell it to back down and the float moves away from the vehicles trailing a line that has been packed into its nose for this purpose. We shoot an air powered cannon that propels a grappling hook trailing a line over the recovery line suspended between the vehicle nose and the recovery float. We then hand haul that back in to the ship, attach a line from the Launch and Recovery System (LARS) onto the recovery line of the vehicle, pull the float off and move the ship forward so that the whole kit and caboodle streams behind us. Once that’s happening we just suck it back up into the LARS, on deck, and into her hut for data download, battery swap out and prep for the next mission.

Easy right? Hah! OK, sometimes not so much. Lots of moving parts that can go wrong in many different ways. And don’t ask me to explain past failures unless you’re sitting next to me in a bar and you’re buying (or you can go here and check out a previous blog of mine on the subject from our Search For Amelia website: http://log.searchforamelia.org/angler-fish. As well you can view video of a recovery here: http://wid.waittinstitute.org/recovering-mary-ann).

The ROV Remora, the vehicle responsible for capturing the 3D footage

On this particular day we had an ROV down on site taking HD 3D footage, the whole world watching live so we didn’t really want to go into the next room and say, “umm, hey guys? We know you’ve been pulling this together for years and now that you got it going on we’d really like to ask a little favor. Do you mind knocking off for a bit? Ya know, take a little break? What’s that? It takes 3 hours to get to the bottom and 2 more to get back up and after finally getting all your integrations burned in you’d really prefer to actually let it work? That the whole point of an ROV is that once you get it down you can leave it down and switch out pilots every couple hours?” We knew better than to even ask, most especially if we had other options. The Phoenix guys have a double tough job in front of them and no one’s idea of a good plan is to move backward.

Not a problem, the WHOI guys that run the AUV’s are Marines at heart: they improvise, overcome and adapt (semper fi to my buddies in the Corps). So it was that Mary Ann was recovered by one of the ship’s small boats, brought over and hooked into the LARs so that the Jean Charcot could stay on station using her dynamic positioning.

Prepping for small boat recovery of an AUV

I was very anxious to get a look at the high resolution sonar Mary Ann had brought home. The multi-beam data was really what the job needed so the ROV guys can have a 3D map of the wreck to avoid entanglement but I love sonar and I was stoked to see what was likely to be the most dramatic sonar record of my career. How many analysts get to look at Titanic the day the data was collected? Indeed, how many sonar analysts get to go to the Titanic in the first place? The sonar will be extremely useful as it will help us define the debris field, spot areas that might have something new to teach us and assist in answering some of the mysteries of Titanic.  And it’s pretty.

But the data would take a while to download and the vehicle was just coming aboard; I had plenty of time for a cup of coffee, a little morning routine action, my favorite of the day. So I got my black/one sugar, went into the imaging lab and slipped on a pair of Billy’s glasses and sat down in front of walls filled with live 3D video of the titanic. I quickly forgot my upcoming sonar data.

The video being generated is simply amazing. To a guy like me who loves this kind of thing words simply fail to carry the impact of just how incredible it was to sit there and enjoy my cuppa joe in front of screens that weren’t reporting the news but making it! It’s moments like that when life is almost unbearably sweet. How did I get here? A guy like me, flatland born, former Alaskan fish buyer, in the oceanography business for all of five years and now, out in the Atlantic, watching in person what millions of people of the world were following on their televisions at home? I tell ya what, that was one damn fine cup of coffee.

At one point we were sitting there, waiting for the ROV to set up for a pass over the bow when suddenly the Remora ran up and over the bow. It was like the shots the 3D films use to remind you you’re watching 3D, the ‘in your face’ splatter shot. Except this time it wasn’t some zombie grabbing at you or the phone falling off the cradle at you like in Hitchcock’s “Dial M for Murder”. All of the sudden the bow of the Titanic was THERE. And it was real. Happening now, 3,700 meters directly below me.

Billy’s gear is amazing; the water around the wreck is filled with little stuff floating around, either plankton or particulate matter. It’s kind of like snow although it really doesn’t seem to affect his images much. Every once in a while something larger would float right in front of the camera and more than once I involuntarily swished my hand in front of my face to wave it away. After a move like that you feel sort of silly but it’s a testament to just how striking and real that footage is. There may be people out there who think 3D is a gimmick but let me tell you, on work like this it has absolute scientific value. You can measure things in that kind of footage. No metering sticks, no laser scalers set project a couple parallel red dots set to a premeasured distance so you know how big something is. This video can actually be used to measure items. Think that’s easy? Take a look at an old video you have of your folks then tell me how tall one of them is.  To the centimeter. It may not sound like a lot but it’s huge, a massive scientific advantage.

That’s not the only one. I truly feel that one should not underestimate the value of just how compelling this footage is to the average person watching. Sometimes you need drama to move the  person who otherwise could care less about the ocean. Getting folks turned on about the oceans is a major reason many oceanographers do what they do.  They want people to understand the importance of that which covers 3/4th of Earth. Billy’s gear will definitely open some eyes. I won’t go too much into the Titanic footage, not now anyway. It makes its own thunder and it doesn’t need my puling voice added. I sat there mesmerized and before I knew it an hour had passed. I hazard a guess that this will be some of the most viewed footage ever created. It’s flat out crazy cool. Find out for yourself.

Given the media coverage on this one it was no surprise that all eyes were turned to the video screens. We are a TV generation; things become real to us once we see it on TV. We tend to get sucked in, a learned behavior. Heck, even I forgot that I had high res sonar imagery of Titanic sitting on the computer. The ROV guys had pretty effectively grabbed the spotlight, all the press turned to them and that’s cool; I said so myself above, that stuff is über sexy. But it didn’t take away the chill I felt when I got my buddy Andy to run the sonar data. He was on his way to lunch but I plead with him to show me a bit as I had to run out on deck to grab up Ginger soon. He relented and man alive, it is smoking hot data. I had to restrain myself from a shout. It’s as dramatic as any sonar data you will ever see. Right now it’s pushing 10PM and ROV ops have ceased and Billy the Phoenix camera tech are standing behind me looking at our side scan data.

“Wow!” “Holy cow!” “That’s sidescan data?” “What frequency and range?” “How high are you flying.” “Look at that.” “Will you show him the stern, please?” “Are those the boilers? Oh man that is amazing!” These are the guys who made the 3D happen and I hope I’m right when I say that they are blown away. It’s off the hook. We also got killer multi-beam data and thousands of photos that are still downloading.
It’s been a banner day at sea.

The view headed into Quidi Vidi Harbor, St. Johns, Newfoundland

Boulder Rock, St. Johns, Newfoundland

I have said to anyone who will listen all day long that I don’t care how long you have or will spend at sea, this has got to be one the best days any expedition ever experienced. In the last 24 hours we have created a high resolution side scan site map and collected multi beam data that will be used to create a 3D map and took some 16,000 photos of the site that will be used in another mosaic. That’s just the AUVs; the ROV team put in 24 hours of 3D filming all over the site, turning out some incredible footage. I mentioned once before that I have only worked searches and in expressing the emotion above others have pointed out to me that the difference is the fact that this is a known site. Still though, it was one helluva day on site and we accomplished a lot, not the least of which is that we had 2 AUVs in the water and continued our operations while a work class ROV was on site 4 klicks below us.  That’s hot ops. Heck, if a hurricane were to push us off the site tomorrow we would all still count this among the best days we ever spend at sea.

Oh yeah, did I mention? A hurricane is going to push us off site tomorrow!

Yep, hurricane Danielle is coming. So it’s back to St Johns to hole up until the storm passes. It’s almost a good thing, we all have so much data to crunch we could use the time. It will take literally days of post processing to get this data ready. The multi-beam data is particularly important. But everybody has their hopes; people want to see this segment or that, look at pictures, check out an area of side scan data. Andy Sherrell, the guy doing our analysis and processing, is sitting on week’s worth of work and everybody wants something now. He’s probably a bit tired of folks trying to ease his mind about it but it’s a measure of the camaraderie out here that those offers of assistance and empathy toward his position atop the mountain of data are expressed  to him.  No worries,he’s all over it.

Alrighty kids, I’m out. I’ll drop something tomorrow but we’re looking at a little hiatus.

<< Data Emerges from Below | Prelude to a Transit: ROV 101 >>

<< Girls in the Water | First Sidescan Data >>

By Michael Dessner

A Big 2 Days
The last two days have been as eventful as any I’ve ever spent at sea. Last night at 1 AM, Mary Ann was recovered with good data from her long range survey of the entire Titanic wreck site. After getting her situated in her hut we all snuck into the lab to wait while the data downloaded, hoping to get a glimpse at the imagery before we had to go back to the deck to prepare for Ginger’s arrival on the surface which was anticipated an hour or so later. Almost immediately we received telemetry from Ginger that indicated her batteries were running low informing us that she would not likely have enough power to finish her mission. Not the end of the world, she was programmed to cover the same area Mary Ann surveyed but from a different direction, her last two lines would likely be well outside the debris field in any case so we were pretty well covered.

Only minutes later we found that she had an even less power remaining than originally thought and had aborted her mission due to a preprogrammed safety protocol that commanded her to do so. This ensured that she would have enough power when she reached the surface to communicate with us, run her strobes and make a phone call over the Iridium network to tell us where she was should we fail to contact her (that’s right, they phone home). Upon hearing that she was en route back to the surface we had to leave the lab and the developing data to get ready to pick her up.

Imaging lab aboard the Jean Charcot.

Expedition leaders Chris Davino (left) and Dave Gallo discuss mission progress.

It was an hour or so later that we gathered back in the lab to look at data. As both vehicles were on the surface and had good data we really had to wake the mission leadership up and wait for them to join us before we ran through the sonar record. We were just a bit jumpy to get a peek at the initial results obtained after months of planning, weeks of equipping and days of sailing and operations. We all seriously wanted to see the first site survey to fully map the entire region around and including the wreck of the Titanic.

We waited, not so patiently, as the group gathered. Talked of previous careers. Discussed the J Geils music playing. Turned off the J Geils music playing. Turned on a little Mozart (I know, surprising what a classy bunch we are). Soon enough all were present and the moment we’d all been waiting for had arrived. Andy rolled the data. It was nice and clean, no noise or other issues. A discussion about the color scheme being used on the screens ensued regarding whether the shadows were black or white. A wager was placed. A Diet Coke was lost.  Don’t worry Dave Gallo of WHOI, I won’t let anybody know that you owe Andy Sherrell of Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute a Diet Coke.

Oops

The only guy in the room at the time who had been here before was Bill Lange, the underwater imaging genius from Woods Hole who designed the HD and 3D cameras to be used on the ROVs during the photographic inspection dives. The sonar map maps we are creating will serve to guide his missions. As Bill was the legacy he played the part of guide as we all watched some fairly dramatic sonar imagery of the ocean floor scroll down the screens.

Again, results from sonar are not pictures: it is a visual representation based on the reflectivity of a target and the strength of the return of the sonic energy bounced from it back to the sonar transducer. Those images require interpretation. What looks like a ridgeline may well be nothing more than a portion of the bottom that has all the sand scoured off it by the current exposing the rock beneath; it may not necessarily rise off the bottom at all. That is why shadows contain so much useful information; you can measure the length of shadows to help you understand how high something rises. The contours of the shadow will also define the shape of the object much like the shadow from a flashlight would.

While we watched the initial lanes of the data scroll Billy would comment on this or that as we tried to orient ourselves to the wreck. As we had not seen any of the previously mapped and photographed structures in the sonar record yet it was still guesswork as to where we were. Then the moment we had been waiting for: what appeared to be the bow of the ship appeared on the screens and that put everything else into perspective, gave us our orientation. That’s when I finally had to crash after 22 hours on the job.

The Morning After
This morning I found we got exactly what we had hoped for from the missions and those images have gone out around the world. I am sure many people are wondering what the big deal is, it’s a tad anticlimactic compared to photography and the long range sonar stuff does no justice to the sense of scale of this site. It needs to be pointed out, the site has never been fully mapped and from what I understand there are still many discoveries to be made. Not all of the ship has been found and the extent of the debris field has never been fully understood. Our work yesterday helped us plan the work the AUVs and Remora will accomplish tomorrow, and that should be an order of magnitude more dramatic.

Currently the girls are down on the site running a higher frequency, and thus higher resolution, sonar. The range scales are going to be a lot shorter, they won’t cover as much ground in as much time but we now know exactly where we want to further develop our understanding and that’s where they’re headed. Aside from sonars Ginger is carrying a camera and Mary Ann the multi-beam. This downward looking sonar hits the area with many more pings per second and although the swath is much narrower we will be able to “see” the site in 3 dimensions once it’s processed. The multi beam data combined with the higher resolution sonar and the mosaic we will generate when all the photos come aboard will give the ROV team a new resource to explore the site, a complete map of the area with exceptionally accurate navigational info. That highly enhanced navigational data will give the ROV pilots a new capability and understanding of the debris field that did not exist before we arrived. It will be a development that will be as stirring and important as all of the work that has gone on previously.

I’d like to say a word about my team out here. The Waitt Institute owns and tasks the AUVs but we collaborate with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, specifically the OSL lab, to operate and maintain them. The men in this group are, aside from being the bunch that developed this technology, exceptionally skilled engineers who put in extremely long and difficult hours. We also work with another electrical engineer from Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, a good friend of mine named Andy Sherrell. He does our sonar analysis and this is our 7th voyage together. On this trip I have seen most of these guys work 20 hour days since our arrival in Newfoundland and they will continue to do so until we pull into port. It’s grueling and they deserve recognition for their effort. Without them the AUVs could not perform as magnificently as they do. In the coming days I will likely profile some of them, I hope you enjoy meeting them as much as I enjoy working with them.

Our Neighbors at Sea
One last personal observation. The pilot whales were back today in force, had to be at least 20 or 30 of them on the surface very near the starboard rail of the ship late this afternoon. It looks like they are feeding on something near the surface, today it looked like a few of them tried to stay almost on top of the water. Their languid glide through the water, their proximity to the others, almost ‘leaning’ on each other as they feed, is compelling. I know whales are social animals with huge ranges but it feels like they want to hang around with us (although I’m certain there is an upwelling or something of the like nearby that has them in the area feeding). There is an elegance and economy of movement to them that I find oddly reassuring and serene. I hope you all have the opportunity to see them in their native habitat someday. They bring to my mind buffalo, a species that once permeated the biosphere they inhabited, placid in the huge numbers that once ranged across our continent. Now you almost have to go to a zoo to see one. I hope for all of our sakes that this is not the resultant case with whales. I have no understanding or even comprehension of those who would hunt or enclose these graceful, highly social and peaceful mammals. A pox on those who prey upon the cephalopods.

<< Girls in the Water | First Sidescan Data >>

<< Closing in on Destination | Data Emerges from Below >>

By Michael Dessner

Noon:
Yesterday saw us delaying our deployments due to weather, winds rose to a level that made deploying the ship’s small boat difficult at best and with no option to get hands next to a vehicle if there were recovery issues we made the decision to delay. AUV team leader Greg Packard, of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, laid down for a few hours to grab some much needed sleep, arose at midnight and made the call to launch the vehicle in the early morning hours.

The first launch took place with little fanfare at 4 AM local and Mary Ann was sent down to run a survey from east to west using her low frequency side scan sonar as well as her Delta T multi-beam. At roughly 8 AM this morning Ginger was launched to do an opposing survey, she will work north/south with the same frequency side scan sonar. When these two maps are laid over each other they will fill in each others shadows for a complete map of the site. We should be looking at that sometime tomorrow and to say everyone is looking forward to seeing them is a massive understatement. In the past I have worked only searches for items undiscovered as opposed to a survey; on searches when we thought we had a target of interest, we would often have to wait days or even weeks for another look. This time we are on survey at a known site. There is little doubt that the girls will come back with dramatic results and anticipation is rising as we await the girls’ return.

After Ginger was launched, a couple AUV techs were up in the Operations Lab showing some of the Phoenix technicians how surveys are programmed; during that instructional period an error was discovered in Gingers programming. This was a fortunate happenstance since Ginger was not yet halfway down to the wreck site and we were able to send her an acoustic command to drop her descent weight as well as her ascent weight and return to the surface immediatley. Instead of losing an operational day we were able to repair the programming error, reload the weights and recovery line and have her back in the water in something just over an hour. Mistakes happen but it’s seldom you have the opportunity to correct them so quickly, yet another valuable feature of the AUVs.

Right now, as I prepare to sign off for a bit and go grab a bite to eat, both vehicles are at depth working along with no negative indications. I am going to give some thought about what to talk about next (we don’t anticipate Mary Ann’s return until 1 AM, 14 hours from now).

An AUV floating at the surface. Photo Credit: Ian Kellett

3PM
How about we learn some stuff about AUV’s aka Autonomous Underwater Vehicles. One of the key aspects to their abilities is in the first word, autonomous, which means they are independent of any surface controlling tethers. They are free swimming, preprogrammed automatons that can perform a number of exceptionally important tasks when undertaking underwater search operations. But before we get to what they can do lets discuss a bit more about what they are.

The Waitt Institute AUV, Mary Ann, awaits testing on deck before the Florida Straits expedition embarks. Photo Credit: Michael Dessner

The girls (as we affectionately refer to them; specifically Mary Ann and Ginger) are 13 foot, 2000 pound torpedo looking devices. They are comprised primarily of titanium and syntactic foam (which is a medium of molded glass microspheres that provide buoyancy). Inside the syntactic hull, mounted to the titanium strongback frame, are all the housings for the instrumentation and the sensors which you will see peaking through the yellow syntactic at various intervals. The bottles and cans that hold the electrical junctions and instrumentation are either pressure resistant due to the extreme nature of their construction from thick walled titanium or are oil filled which allows them to compensate for the extreme pressures to which they are subjected. The vehicles are rated to what is commonly accepted as full ocean depth, 6000 meters, although the abysses of the planet are much, much deeper. The pressures that the vehicles must survive to operate at this depth are simply astronomical. At full depth a square inch would have 8,400 lbs of pressure on it. A square foot would then have one million two hundred nine thousand six hundred pounds of force exerted on it. The rough area of the vehicle in total is about 90 feet. That means the entire vehicle, when at full depth, is under one hundred eight million eight hundred sixty thousand pounds (108,860,000 lbs), or, if ya wanna round it off, just call it an even 54,000 tons. When I tell people these things are bullet proof I ain’t lying. On this job we’re only working at about 3,700 meters, so the vehicles are only suffering 33,000 tons of force. A walk in the park to the girls.

What’s that you say? “Alright, they’re damn tough but what else can they do? After all, as any cook worth his salt will tell you, you’re only as good as your last meal.”. Well listen up my friend and listen well. About the only things these things can’t do at full ocean depth is carry a tune or pick something up.

The primary sensor on the AUVs is side scan sonar but ours can carry a suite of additional equipment as well. I won’t go much into sonar here (detailed information about that can be found in my logs from the Search for Amelia (http://log.searchforamelia.org) but in essence they are like sonic flashlights shined out to either side of the vehicle, effective out to 600 meters in each direction. You “see” what the flashlight in the metaphor would light up and the shadows created give you a lot of information, help define the shape of the “lit” item. Depending on the reflectivity of the surface you can also tell a lot about its nature (for instance sponges are less reflective, steel much more so).

Mounted permanently on the bottom of the girls are Doppler Velocity Loggers which can be set to act as Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (used to measure water currents). This sensor looks a bit like a hat with 4 red circles on it and acts as a bottom sensor. When the vehicles get to depth this ‘sees’ the bottom and then helps the vehicle maintain altitude. It also works with the system’s computers and a pencil beam sonar mounted on the nose that looks forward and slightly downward, effectively providing the system collision avoidance capabilities. The AUV is slightly buoyant after it releases its descent weight and if these sensors tell its brain that it’s about to run into something it tries to turn up and avoid it; if that doesn’t work it stops the prop from turning and floats upwards until the obstacle is no longer detected, then it purrs merrily along doing its thing. This is invaluable in a search like the Air France flight 447 effort which is taking place above a submerged mountain range. A towed system is very difficult to handle on that type of search (deep with rugged terrain) because you are often trailing equipment well behind and far below your support vessel and if you are constantly coming too far off the bottom you are not making good data. The girls can come to a near full stop as they float upwards so when they start moving again they haven’t missed so much. It is a signature capability of the REMUS AUV’s.

The Waitt Institute also owns a multi-beam unit that can be mounted on the girls; this is like a downward looking sonar that can be used to produce a 3 dimensional representation of what the vehicles ‘see’ below them. One reason we use sonars instead of multi beam is that the swath, or area covered, is so much smaller when using the multi beam. The vehicles have what we refer to as an “Eco Puck” which acts as a CTD (conductivity, salinity and depth) sensor, the data from which it uses in its navigations. This can be rigged with a sub bottom profiler which gives readings that inform the user of the make up of the bottom (sand, gravel, coral, etc). I really do not know much about this sensor but we plan to use it out here so more on that one later as I learn.

Finally the vehicle carries a camera. Now that may not seem like much but this, too, is a signature sensor of the Waitt Institute AUVs. Imagine with me for a moment…. you are looking for something on the ocean bottom and you are towing a side scan sonar (as the Institute did working in conjunction with Naticos in ’06 looking for Amelia Earhart’s plane). You are sitting in front of a screen watching data drop down about an inch every 15 minutes and shazam, you get a hot target. Naturally you want to get another look. If you are towing at ocean depth a turn alone may take a couple hours and you may not have the ability to switch to a higher frequency for better resolution. But we’ll say you do, so you make a two hour turn and switch freq.s and go past it again. If you are lucky enough to trail your tether, which is towing your sonar 4 miles below you and four miles behind you, directly over your target (and trust me, that ain’t easy) you still are going to be looking at a sonar image and that is nothing like a picture. It is a representation based on sonic energy and it needs interpreting. Moving on, your target still looks hot and you decide you want to take a real look at it. So you haul in your sonar which takes hours, rig your AUV, more hours, send it down and assuming you don’t have any ground fault issues and get directly onto your target (ASS U ME, remember) when you find it you will know. It could take days if everything works, weeks if not, months to years if you don’t have an ROV that can handle the job and have to go back to port, raise money and get back out there; all based on a interpreted image. Good luck with that pitch.

Mary Ann, the 6000-meter AUV. Photo Credit: Brian Cousin

Now, cut to the girls in the same scenario. One of them was on a 24 hour mission; after recovery, data download and an hour or two of a quick initial look at the data the sonar analyst sees something he likes as a target and wants another look. On her next run she is programmed to re-acquire target for assessment and 4 hours after she came to the surface she is headed back to the bottom. She heads into the next box up the line and when she gets close to the target area she breaks off to head to the target and remember, our navs are flawless as they rely both on Deep Ocean Transponders and a Kearfott Inertial Navigation Unit in the AUV. It’s the kind of technology the military uses to put missiles into basketball hoops hundreds of miles from launch. We don’t miss. When she gets to the target zone she drops in altitude, switches to high frequency, high resolution sonar and begins clicking away with her camera. 24 hours after launch you know whether or not you have found your target. Don’t take my word for it; ask anyone in the industry, it’s a huge capability. To be able to ground truth within a day of detection at full ocean depth? It’s revolutionary to the world of underwater survey, an unparalleled, cutting edge technology that I truly believe will put towed systems out of business in the next 20 years. Don’t get me wrong, I mean no offense to my brethren in the field who use towed systems. Those systems work and they work well but, I believe the improvement in capabilities represented by AUVs is an exponential leap in technology and is the way of the future.

Whew. I’m all wrung out. Talking about the girls gets me going, they’re just so darn cool. Right now both girls are working away, recovery tonight, first sonar images of Titanic will be in front of me in mere hours (I have trouble believing I just said that. Mrs. Dessner’s little boy is working on TITANIC! Man I love my job and can’t say enough about the man who gave it to me although what Ted Waitt has done for me is nothing in comparison to what he’s done for the rest of the world through his philanthropy. A truly amazing man doing important and fantastic things in many different fields. Check it out: http://waittfoundation.org )

<< Closing in on Destination | Data Emerges from Below >>

<< Musings de la Mer | Girls in the Water >>

By Michael Dessner

10:00 AM
We are closing on our destination and the vibes on board the ship are palpable and, in a way, wonderful. People are energized, quickly attending to their duties and happily so. Everybody knows that within hours the months of planning and preparing will end and a new phase of the expeditions will begin. Operations. Say it with me: “Operations”. OPERATIONS! Forgive my exuberance but that word has been a mantra for me ever since my fish slinging days in Alaska. Planning and logistics are my forte but the real fun, the meat, is in the doing. I am probably one of the most fortunate people on board, damned lucky to be here; I did not cut my teeth in this field and now I am about to begin working on the most famous shipwreck in the world with some of the top people in their fields. It’s heady stuff.

It seems like the stars have aligned for us, or at least the low and high pressure systems. For the first time since my arrival in Newfoundland I am seeing some serious blue sky above us. We are seeing a slightly elevated sea state from most of the transit but that’s not an issue, its well within our operating envelope and I will tradeoff a bit of motion for the happy rays of the sun any day.

In an hour or so we will arrive and after a memorial ceremony we will begin operations. Step one: deploy and survey in the AUV system Deep Ocean Transponders (DOTs). Then we will put one of the girls in. We are going to be using our longer range sonars set at a slightly closer range than usual, to get technical we going to use our 120 kHz sonars set at a 400M range scale and run them at a 40M altitude. The second vehicle will go in some time later and run the same basic mission but from a different direction, this will fill in any ‘holidays’ in our data. I’d love to jabber on some more but my guys are working their heinies off and I really should join them.

9:00 PM
On a job in the Caribbean a man I admire on many levels, Dr. Donald Keith, was making conversation on the back deck while we towed a side scan sonar (an activity that I’ve heard on many occasions compared to watching paint dry). Don asked a rhetorical question meant to stimulate discussion, which I thought was pretty cool in and of itself as he helped us kill a couple hours that way. Don’s an awesome guy, works with Ships of Discovery and in the Turks and Caicos islands, most recently on the wreck Trouvadore. The question he asked was, “what is it that money cannot buy?” A spirited debate that often turned humorous followed but one person made an answer that I never forgot. He said, “No matter how much money you have you can’t buy good weather”. That’s a pretty clear hint on how this entry is going to end.

But let’s go back to those hours of yore when all were happy and attitudes were at their apex, that time when we went operational just 12 hours ago. The sun was shining, the gear was ready, all we had to do was start doing our thing, and that’s exactly what we did.

First, though, we had some serious business to attend to. As everyone reading this knows, the sinking of the Titanic was a dramatic human tragedy in which over 1500 lives were lost. It was only fitting that as we entered the waters over Titanic we pause for moment to remember and honor those souls who made the ultimate journey on that fateful night almost a hundred year ago. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of an expedition like this, the cutting edge equipment run by the best and brightest in their fields, but everyone aboard this ship knows that this is more than just an archeological site, it is first and foremost the final resting place of 815 passengers and 688 crew who perished in the dark and cold. Thus when we arrived those of us available went to the bow of the ship and reflected upon those sobering thoughts and placed flowers into the ocean commemorating the loss. It was a brief yet sincere and heartfelt ceremony.

Tending a transducer

Ground Guide Andy and Deck Boss Mark Dennet

Afterwards the AUV team prepped our Deep Ocean Transponders (DOT) on the back deck. The DOTs are used to set a baseline that the AUVs check their progress against and are key to the successful re-navigation back to a target of interest. They are acoustic place markers that we anchor to the bottom that then communicate their position to the vehicles and help them navigate. When we deploy them we first drift flotation balls in the water, then a section of line, then the DOT itself, another length of line and an anchor. They fall to the ocean floor (it takes about an hour for them to fall the 3,700 meters to the bottom) and then we triangulate their positions by moving the ship to a few different locations and then interrogating the DOTs with a transducer on the surface. That interaction gives us range to the DOTs, we already know how deep they are and after doing this a few times we know exactly where they are. That is programmed into the AUV missions so that when Mary Ann and Ginger check their positions with the DOTs they can ‘calculate’ their exact location. The DOTs work in concert with the Inertial Navigation Units aboard the AUVS and this combination makes their navs powerfully accurate.

During the DOT survey some of the locals came out to observe

So we splashed the DOTs, did some running around triangulating them and as the day progressed so did the wind also rise. By the time we were ready to start getting the vehicles ready for the water whispers were going around the ship that the weather might be going to come up even more. As the sun edged toward the horizon the waves started to edge up onto the deck. A meeting was held and it was decided that we would indeed wait until midnight to check the weather again and reassess. Not a big deal, I have never been to sea when weather did not affect operations so it’s really par for the course, but it does kind of take the wind out of your sails a bit. I do think, however that the weather situation will subside enough that we will be able to launch the vehicles at first light (knock wood).

One other happy note, we were visited on a couple occasions today as we surveyed DOTS by a curious pod of pilot whales. I could go on for pages about how cool I think whales are and how I feel humanity will be judged by how it treats these majestic mammals of the oceans but its getting late and I need to go to bed if I am going to be up in time to launch at first light, so I’ll simply throw a pic or two of our companions in the waters over Titanic. They really say enough.

<< Musings de la Mer | Girls in the Water >>

<< A Plan | Closing in on Destination >>

By Michael Dessner

I had originally intended to discuss transits but this one kind of took on a life of its own, so…it is what it is

The image that probably comes to the minds of most people when they think about an ocean journey is probably something very close to what the film Titanic portrayed as the level of service delivered to the upper crust characters. Crystal chandeliers hanging in grand staircases, teak decks littered with lounge chairs where liveried staff ply passengers with big boat drinks complete with umbrellas and fresh slices of fruit. To be certain there are hundreds of thousands of people alive today who have probably enjoyed something relatively close to that level of service on cruise ships and luxury yachts of which there seem to be more and more each passing year. That impression is entertaining and if you are lucky enough to actually have enjoyed it more power to you, but it has nothing at all to do with the reality that the vast majority of those who work on the ocean generally experience. The thousands of ships that haul goods, fish and do ocean research present a much different experience to those of us who do this kind of thing for a living. These vessels are not luxurious in any sense; they are, in a word, workboats.

A workboat is a thing of steel, engineering and marine architecture that is designed for one thing, to accomplish a job. Whether it be an oil rig, container ship, tanker, fishing boat or naval vessel, they all have a job to do, a primary task over which all other considerations are taken into account. They can be comfortable but they are almost never luxurious. They can have lots of space but seldom is that space dedicated to your personal use. They can be equipped with the most modern equipment and electronics but those are often housed in a hull that is running a bit of rust down the side and many are often coated with layer upon layer of paint to combat the oxidation that can eventually destroy even the most solid steels. They have a job to do and most certainly that job is not to tuck you into bed at night with a hug after milk and cookies. Often they are cold, smelly, dirty, tight spaces in which too much gets done in too little space and where even the mildest of poor attitudes can build and steamroll morale into the ground (so to speak). Workboat, the name says it all

The back deck of the Jean Charcot

Fine workout facilities

The imaging lab

Now don’t get me wrong, the Jean Charcot is no slave galley and it is not the kind of ship that would have you wishing you were safely back in your bed on the beach, but it is most definitely a workboat. She is 46 years old and everywhere you go on deck you can see the remnants of equipment that had been welded down then cut off when the next set of gear came aboard. She’s French constructed, flagged out of the UK and, as I mentioned yesterday, crewed by an international team of seasoned sea going personnel. She is built to ply the world’s oceans and deliver people to places off beaten paths, just as she will do for us during our visit to Titanic. As workboats go she is well appointed, the galley is spacious, she has a workout room and a nice lounge with gaming console and TV for movie watching. There are plenty of berths aboard, laundry facilities, and each deck has lavatories that serve the surrounding rooms. While the quarters can be a bit cramped they are not unusually or unduly so. I am one of the lucky few to have my own stateroom; it consists of a bunk with a reading light overhead and a shelf above the lower portion, a small desk with cupboard, a closet, one chair and a sink (also lit) with a small bench seat running from the sink to the bunk. The floor space inside all of that is exactly 24 square feet. I haven’t done much looking around the other rooms so I cannot speak for the conditions the rest of my team is living with but I would be highly surprised if they have much more in the way of personal space. The corridors would seem tight to someone not used to traveling on workboats and a trip up the central stairs would not be mistaken for a glide down the staircase featured in Jim Cameron’s Titanic; ours also acts as a central trunk for wiring and so one wall is basically bundled with cables running through the center of the ship. She seems to have a kindly ride through the water (at least so far, as our weather has been pleasant) and the aft work deck is sufficiently high enough from the waterline so as to be dry, a nice thing if you have to spend much time out there. Nothing can suck the fun out of your day as a couple of hours in wet boots because you weren’t looking when a wave washed over the top of your boots.

But no matter what kind of ship you happen to go to sea aboard there are some commonalities of experience that all seagoers share once away from shore. I won’t go into the motion of the ocean, I assume that everybody understands that ships move around quite a bit which can have a most uncomfortable side effect of initiating seasickness; rather I’d like to look at some of the positives.

One of the first things you notice is the Deep Blue and there is really nothing like seeing this for the first time in your life. When you’re well away from land and get into some real water the hue of the ocean takes on a deep majestic blue; it’s striking and unforgettable. I’m sure there are many who think the color of life is green but do not count me among them; the color of the ocean, that deep blue, to me that is the true color of life. People forget that we live on a water planet, a vagary of perception I suppose, the egocentrism of the land dweller. Nothing wrong with it, we know what we learn and the smallest minority of humanity spends time at sea, but a water planet she is and this all encompassing medium affects us all more than we know or can truly even understand. The oceans are the most important part of our biosphere and we know so little about them it should be shameful to us as a species. We know more about the dead rock that orbits our planet that we do that which covers well over half of its surface. And perhaps that is why this deep azure hue speaks so to me. Perhaps it is a genetic memory, some byproduct of evolution and the millions of years since we first crawled from it to gasp in the atmosphere and begin our domination of the other 3/10ths of the planets surface. I wax romantic but I dare you to deny the power of it once you’ve seen it. It can, and will, change the way you perceive everything else you know.

Another aspect of being at deep sea that is powerful to me is how it consolidates your day to day life, forces you to live in the moment, to “live deliberately” as Thoreau put it. Certainly the technology exists now for us to be in even the deepest reaches of the oceans and still access satellites, watch TV, tap away on our I-phones and Tweet to our hearts content, but few people can afford such services and I, for one, am glad for it. Yes, aboard the Jean Charcot we have a satellite connection but there is no TV coming aboard and 40 some people sharing the same internet connection tends to slow things down to the performance of a dial up modem; only the most ardent Facebookers have the patience for that these days. So you unplug, read a book, actually pay attention to what you are doing, where you are and who you are with. When I come to sea I turn off my blackberry, empty the money from my pockets, put my billfold in a drawer and don’t think of them until I can see the beach. I carry a flashlight, notepad, pen, Leatherman and a knife. I have no keys, don’t think about the meter in front of my car, I won’t be checking my mail for a few weeks, if I forget to shave or put on mismatching socks no one is going to care. Somebody else cooks for me, I don’t shop, worry about traffic or think too much about the news. My universe becomes the ship and the ocean, wind, wave and sky. You don’t bump into old girlfriends or wonder if that was a movie star you saw out of the corner of your eye. You see the clouds, watch the waves, look for whales and dolphins and actually interact with those people who are seeing it with you. Conversations slow down, patience comes to the fore and deliberateness is a virtue, indeed an asset to your survival. There’s no speed, everything is going past at around 10 miles an hour. Actually YOU are the one going past at ten miles an hour, and accompanying you is everything you are going to have at your disposal until you get back home. There’s no running to the store to pick up anything at all. If you don’t have it then you either don’t need it or you better damn well figure out a workaround; and at sea you do, your inventiveness needs to adapt to the fact that if you can’t cobble together a solution then you better give it up. Sure you can watch a movie or read a book but only if you brought them or can borrow them from your neighbor. Our reality changes, it is now a couple hundred feet of steel and everything in it surrounded by nothing but nature as far as the eye can see. Like a desert, only, you know, a lot more wet with even fewer plants. Maybe it sounds restrictive, limited, but I find it incredibly liberating. I love it.

Everybody deals with the ocean there own way I guess. Some people seem to become more energized and others seem subdued by it but there is one thing we all share, a sense of purpose. By definition a workboat is dedicated to a task or sets of tasks and that becomes your raison d’être, at least for the duration of the cruise. We, on this ship, are all in essence risking our lives to go somewhere and investigate a site where many, many others lost theirs, and we are doing it because we want to participate in a new understanding of something, because we want to share that understanding with you. It’s valid and deep (no pun intended), what we will do out here, it’s meaningful in a way that few things can be. Often when people talk about a shared sense of meaning they are referring to a negative, an adversity, of overcoming hardships together. This is often referred to when discussing war, which in a way saddens me. If only more people could participate in something that brings a sense of comradeship and brotherhood through increasing their knowledge, by bettering their sense of understanding of themselves and their subject, improving themselves by increasing their comprehension about something by overcoming obstacles that are not martial in nature but scientific. I’m not sure how I got here but I guess it does lend itself to my point. Time I spend at sea helps me focus, it seems to clear away the dross of everyday life and shine the light of introspection on the truly important. It brings me something I think we all could use more of in the day and age: clarity.

OK, I think that’s a good place to wrap this up. I’m going to take a walk around and try and grab some candid shots of folks attending to their tasks and some of the areas on the ship, give you an idea of life aboard.

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The Narrows on departing St. John's, Newfoundland

By Michael Dessner

A plan coming together is very seldom what you envision it to be and our preparation for the cruise to Titanic has not been an exception. We are working aboard the R/V Jean Charcot, a French ship that is primarily staffed by Russians, Scots, Irish and Pilipino crew. The Waitt Institute of the west coast is providing the AUV system and our operations team hails from the opposite side of the continent and Woods Hole, Mass. There are media folks aboard from all corners of the country, an ROV team from the highly regard Phoenix International and they are also working with another team from the imaging labs at WHOI to provision the ROV with up to 5 HD cameras and another set of cutting edge 3D cameras. Filling out the bill are a couple gents who will handle navigation information and they hail from Seattle’s Williamson and Associates, another highly regarded underwater survey group. Add to that Dr. James Delgado of the Institute for Nautical Archeology, Dr. David Gallo who is a Director of Special Projects at WHOI and president of RMS Titanic, Chris Davino, all of whom are providing leadership. We are going to be operating AUVs and a work class ROV sporting freshly added imagining systems, it’s one helluva lot of moving parts and separate teams all coming together onto a new ship and installing their equipment, all in under a week. Generally speaking it would be tough for such a diverse group of people to get on the same page in a week much less mobilize for an expedition of this stature. But let’s go back in time a bit and get caught up; in all the running around and after 12 to 14 hour days actually working rather than riding a desk I took a couple days away from my computer to concentrate on the physical, now that I am dedicating time to the literal I’ll take a moment to catch up.

The full toolkit on the dock prior to loading and organizing.

I think I left things off around the 20th.  There’s not really a lot to say about the integration of equipment except that it’s kind of like painting a house: it looks a lot worse than it is and always, always gets bad before it gets better., But when you’re done, it’s a thing of beauty. The last few days have been a lot like that. We started from a bare deck and began adding the Waitt Institute’s AUV system. The Waitt launch and recovery system (LARS) went on first and the procedure used to install it was almost identical for every piece that followed.

First you measure out the space where you want the item to go, this is always done in advance but that’s pretty much theory and based on drawings that are being worked sometimes thousands of miles away from the boat. In reality when you get to the steel of the ship you usually find that things are not always exactly as they have been represented. So you break out the measuring tape and block out where you want your gear to go and, as many of my smarter friends have told me, it’s best to measure twice and cut once. After blocking out your space it’s time get the equipment in question into place. Measure it again, check out the lines of work and make sure the gear is going to be able to do what you need. Nothing on a ship at sea is just set down; it gets welded into place. You could say the rule of thumb on a ship might be more accurately stated as measure thrice and weld once or prepare to blowtorch, grind and try again.

Once our LARS is placed on the horizontal plane its time to make sure that the vertical is right. The AUV’s have to move across from one van to the LARS and if the tracks running to and fro are too low or too high, at least with the AUV system, you got yourself some troubles. In our case each van and the LARS had to have a set of custom feet or riser bars added to them to put all the gear onto a level playing field. After all it’s not like ships decks are flat; you want a little slope on the decks so that when the water starts washing over it has a way to drain off. That means you’re working on sloped decks which leads to more measuring and placing and re-placing the equipment. At that point you’re glad to have a patient and competent crane operator. Patient because each time something changes you need to rig the container or equipment and then pick it up, set it back down, check and recheck; and competent because he’s lifting vans or equipment that range into the tens of thousands of pounds and you’re often working with digits (if not your entire body) in pinch points. Integrations are a madhouse ballet: you’ve got the operators running around and putting everything in line; crane operators working with ground guides to get things in place again and again; fabricators helping pull together risers, feet, pad eyes for ties down, railings and stanchions where needed; grinders shaving down the odd bits getting in the way or removing old welds so they can be redone; welders using cutting rod to zorch off anything that doesn’t need to be there; electricians pulling power and comms lines making runs through the penetrators to run up or across decks; ships crew making sure safety measures are taken into account and that our operations do not negatively impact the running of the ship, welders making the final welds when things are in place and above it all: three groups of cameramen and bloggers trying to capture and understand everything. Cue music, whirl like dervish, repeat.

Port aft quarter, fully loaded

LARs on first, then Mary Ann’s hut, followed by Ginger’s, once those are set its time to stage some weights for the deployments, our air gun for recoveries, Benthos balls for the Deep Ocean Transponders (DOTS), crates of line and chain for tie downs, our pedestal for controlling the LARS, the hydraulic power unit for running the LARS, a van of spares and equipment we don’t want to be without. The list is long and that’s just ours. Add to that same deck at the same time a Phoenix International work class Remote Operated Vehicle: two vans, one a mechanical spares van and workshop the other a vehicle control and electrical spares van; the LARs for the ROV followed by the huge winch carrying 7000 meters of .68 inch armored fiber optic cable, a generator to power it all and then you’re ready to set the ROV on the LARS. In a dream that would do it but here it just the beginning, now the ROV team has to add the cameras and that is such an intricate job I am going to save it for another posting. You’d think that would cover it but it’s not even close. Once all the gear is in place its time to wire everything up, drop a generator into the middle of it all and start stringing cat 5 cables and power lines, hydraulic lines and other necessary cables and comms lines so everybody is speaking the same language data-wise. Then test, retest, repair, test, retest, tweak, test….well you get the idea.

While this is happening the ship is also provisioning, 6 trucks worth of fuel are bunkered aboard, a few trucks filled with food have to be unloaded and foodstuffs stored by the same people who are already feeding 47 people. It’s a vast and intricate dance and requires everyone to pull together to get it right. As this job is media intensive there were also truckloads of camera equipment added, media teams to sort and install it and while they are putting their kit together they’re also reporting. No one gets to do just one thing at a time, usually you’re trying to keep multiple balls in the air, put the jigsaw together and cover all your bases before the show kicks off. It was damn hectic but in a true testament to the professionalism of the people on this expedition it came together nicely.

Once the spider web of communications and data cable are in place the testing begins and runs constantly right up until the equipment is deployed, everyone wants their gear to work and work at its highest potential. While all of that was being done the group of techs who joined us from Billy Lange’s imaging shop at Woods Hole Oceanographic was busy putting together the junction bottle that would run the 5 HV and one 3D camera that we plan to use aboard the Phoenix Remora ROV. Frankly I’m surprised they were able to get it done, adding half a dozen cameras to an ocean depth work ROV is not something that’s usually accomplished in a month much less a week. That equipment, the cameras on the ROV’s, are really going to shine on this expedition. I’m not sure but I think nothing quite like it has been done before, but that, too, is another subject for another post.

It’s not all work though. My AUV operating team took a lunch one day and we visited Signal Hill in St. Johns and got a nice overlook of the area while also catching up on some the local history. As well the night before our scheduled departure RMS Titanic threw us a little going away gala; they’d already provided us with some super sweet swag, jackets hats and shirts branded with the expedition logo. The party was a good time, the food was great and the drinks were flowing and many long lasting friendships were begun.

Author's cabin for the next three weeks

My ribs hurt the next morning so many laughs did I enjoy. I could fill a few pages on the antics but perhaps they are best left to the imagination, after all, even seagoing scientists are deserving of a little privacy. I’m just glad to report that no one seriously overindulged, we suffered no local entanglements and the following day everybody made it to work. Again, almost amazing. Sea going folk party hard and we kept the faith but again, the professionalism of the group was the rule of the day and everybody was aboard when the lines were pulled.

So it’s closing in midnight and I am sitting in my little stateroom pecking away and enjoying the salt breeze and sound of the hull slicing though the waves from my open porthole. There are a few folks up in the labs putting finishing touches on the gear, running some more comm. Lines and editing film but most everybody is nestled in their bunks while they acclimate to being underway. A calm has descended upon the ship while we settle into the new routine, that of the sea-goer.

Tomorrow: transits

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A Plan >>

The R/V Jean Charcot in St. Johns, Newfoundland

By Michael Dessner

I arrived last night at 10:30 PM into St John’s, Newfoundland, cleared customs with no hassles and grabbed a cab into town, noting the hilly terrain and a well lit urban area much larger than I had imagined. The area is well developed (just so as this is purported to be the oldest city in North America) and seems typically northeastern: a lot of older, wooden construction with the more modern buildings sprinkled throughout in what I have learned is a fairly Canadian fashion, everything neatly laid out with sightlines taken into account. It’s very picaresque and the locals are also typical of my past experience with Canadians: polite, happy and helpful.

The skies were clear, the weather cool (mid 60’s) as I checked into my hotel and dropped my bags in my room, which boasts a view of the narrows and the pier where the R/V Jean Charcot is tied up. I checked with my teammates from Woods Hole and found that they had landed just behind me and would be in their rooms shortly; we made arrangements to meet on St. George’s Street.

I’m not sure how the locals would care for this characterization but St. Georges Street seemed to me like a smaller, cleaner version Bourbon Street North without the puking kids and women flashing their goods for strings of beads. A narrow lane of tightly packed bars and restaurants on the hillside paralleling the water, lots of music blaring out onto the street which held a fair number of folks enjoying the nightlife, St. Georges Street was somewhat a surprise on a Tuesday night late in the summer. I turned into the first Irish pub I came across and enjoyed a Jameson’s whiskey in a nod to my good friend and Alaskan fisherman, Baja Steve (a routine I learned from him: when entering a new town on the water, start with a drink among the Irish). By then the boys had arrived in the area and we all met to catch up and tell lies in a different Irish pub just up the lane (apparently the WHOI boys also enjoy the same tradition). We gossiped and laughed and gave a good natured hard time to the new kid, a nice looking lad named Kevin who the WHOI Ops team had recently brought on board. We wrapped up after a couple and grabbed a slice and a cab and made our way back to our rooms. I had a capital good time on St. George’s and expect I’ll have one or two more before I leave Newfoundland to come home.

The only other item of note was that around 11PM we all heard a number of sirens running through town. I recalled that earlier I had put my glasses on the ship from my room and had seen that there was some grinding and cutting being done as evidenced by the strobe like flares of flaming welding rod and showers of sparks put out by the grinders. I remember thinking to myself as the sirens wailed past, “I hope that ain’t got nothing to do with us”. If I could only learn how to put such thoughts from my head; their self fulfilling nature is no fun at all.

I woke up a jet lagged hour behind schedule and checked in with the team. They were still lazing over breakfast and informed me that indeed the sirens we’d heard the night before had been the local fire department responding to a fire aboard the ship. Fire on boats is ultra bad news, generally speaking if you do not have a fire under control on a ship within 7 minutes its time to abandon because it she will be going down. Most everything that can burn on a boat will also kill you if you take a lungful of the smoke generated. Thankfully this was a small fire, caused by the heating of cutting torches on the back deck which had warmed through the bulkhead and ignited some wiring in the ceiling of the deck below. A lot of smoke but little damage, however the trouble was that now we had the locals involved and before work could resume they had to finish their investigation. The ship was closed for hotwork until that was completed, hence the easy breakfast the boys took this morning.

Today was a grey day, when I first awoke it seemed just lightly overcast but the fog bank I spied beyond the narrows leading into the area known as the Grand Bank was forbidding. Deep and thick, an impenetrable grey blanket lay on the water just outside the harbor. As the day progressed so did the grey and by 3 in the afternoon it was raining. Right around the same time hotwork was resumed which was critical to our timeline. During the morning hours all we could do was unload our trucks and stage some equipment; until the gear on board from the previous job was cut free and the deck ground down we would be unable to move forward with welding our equipment to the deck. Once hotwork resumed that gear was craned off and our guys started laying out their deck pattern for the AUV system. Our plan today is to get the LARS installed and that looks like it will take place, albeit probably not until later this evening. The team cut me loose and put me on call if they needed me but right now most of the work being done is finger pointing by the leaders of our group as they direct the crane driver and welders on what they need done.

The ship is definitely a workboat, not beautiful but sturdy, lots of steel to work with and plenty of space. There are a multitude of groups coming together for this expedition and many folks, to include the leadership, are not yet here. The deck crew looks mainly comprised of Pilipino sailors, I detected an Irish or Scottish brogue among a few of the crew and have yet to meet the captain or mates. A truckload of food arrived during the afternoon and just a few crewmembers were working to carry the boxes up over the gangway and having a tough go of it. I joined in and then the rest of the Ops team followed. Before you knew it we had a good bucket brigade going, enough people where all you had to do was take a box from the guy on your right and hand it to the person on your left, a couple hours work reduced to 20 minutes and done as a group with no thought given to whether or not it was “my job”. The first smiles and introductions followed, I rate it as the most important thing I accomplished today.

This is going to be a good cruise. A good group of people, that much is apparent now, clear objectives and a concise plan. I can tell already that I will, on this voyage, as I have on just about every one that preceded it, make some lifelong friends.

A Plan >>