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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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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