Mission days 4-5-6
It’s an absolutely insanely paced expedition! We have 20 scientists, two submarines with
support crews of 4 to 5…each! And…that
includes the Chef and his assistant!
Then there is our dive team, six personnel supporting each other, the BEX
crew of 5 – 3 captains – and then all the administrative staff for
NektonMission.org, Project Baseline and the academic personnel for the
scientists. I have to tell you it is
crazy-wild starting at 7am continuous...sometimes thru dinner!
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| The SVS Camera System with the light brackets... minus the lights. |
Friday 22, July was our first expedition dive…Project Baseline
Mission Dive one. Finally!!!! Our site as selected by the science group was
Spittal located just outside of St. George Harbor on the North East end of
Bermuda. The plan was to test our
protocols for using the SVS camera mounted to the SUEX scooters, that are
pulling us around, allowing us to video the 50 meter transects. Our target depth was planned to be 200 feet
and our time was to be 70 – 80 minutes on the bottom.
Todd Kincaid, Susan Bird and myself entered at 2:15pm local
time and dropped at 2:39. Our down line, the line we follow to the bottom, was
placed at 150 feet and once we landed on the bottom, we headed for 200
feet. Our scooters made short work of
that 1000-foot distance and in 7 minutes we were setting up our first SVS video
transect.
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| Todd Holding the SVS Camera System Susan, reeling in the transect tape behind Me? On the other side of the camera |
Saturday 23, July was dive day for our second team on this
part of the mission. Meredith Tanguay,
Graham Blackmore and Kevin Dow. As I
mentioned earlier, the way we execute dives is from our specialized dive support
boat, Fountain and operating that boat and supporting that day’s dives is the
other dive team. So today, Todd, Susan
and I were operating the boat while the other three went underwater (Todd,
Meredith and I are Diving Safety Officers for the Baseline Explorer and Global
Underwater Explorers, Project Baseline).
Quick explanation. Because
of the depths of these dives (200 – 350 feet), the planned underwater mission
times (5 – 6 hours underwater) and the duration of the mission (20 days), it is
not physically safe to dive consecutive days so we break it up and dive every
other day and support on our off days.
Back to today…and this is very cool and exciting. With the intel and knowledge that we passed
on to the “red” team (my team is the “blue” team…drysuit colors…names that just
kind of naturally developed) they were able to complete 8 SVS video transects
and 4 benthic. They knocked it out of
the park. They worked at 200 feet, with the submarines observing and
were underwater for a bit over 5 hours.
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| Divers working with "Nemo" one of our two Triton Submarines |
Sunday, 24 July. The
blue team was at bat. We were heading
for the Argus Bank. 30 miles southwest
of Bermuda and part of the Bermuda Rise.
No land in sight. A sea mount
created by an underwater volcano that rose to within 180 feet of the surface. Today we were going to 300 feet (90 Meters by
the scientific definition) but again, no-one has ever done this dive in this
manner…ever! So again, the blue team was
out to gather intel and pass that along to the red team. We dropped down to 190 feet and headed east
looking for the Argus Bank rise. 10
minutes later we hit the edge of a 10,000-foot abyss. We dropped down to 300 feet and began our
work. The first thing we encountered was
a current! This really makes it hard on
us as a dive team because now you have to manage all our gear, lights,
scooters, cameras, transect tape measures and water sample bottles; yes, we are
also doing water sampling at 20 meter (70 foot) increments. With visibility of about 100 feet, we began
our work and it was exhilarating to be working in pure weightlessness over
10,000 feet of water. The wall was very
rocky and covered in purple corals and green algae. Swimming around were many pelagic’s. Closer to the wall were many smaller fish,
like amber jacks, gobies, damsel fish and we even saw a few really colorful
anemones but big, like 16-18 inches in diameter; usually they are half this
size. After 45 minutes we completed our
2 SVS video and single Benthic transect and moved ups to 185, took some more
water samples, scootered around the top of the bank for another 20 minutes and
at minute 65, we began our decompression to the surface. Our deco today, some 220 minutes, was spent floating
in that current, blue water (not along the bottom – midway between the bottom
and the surface. A very tedious and boring
3.5 hours but necessary for this kind of research diving. At the
end of the day we visited a world 314 feet below the surface, literally in the
middle of the Atlantic, spent 65 minutes on the bottom and the rest of the
underwater time floating south some 2.5 miles where we started.
I end by answering the question, “how does the diver support
boat and your support team upon it know where you are underwater”? A small 30-inch-long orange tow-fish floating
at the surface attached to me with about 500 feet of line scoped out above
me. A great day; a great mission; thanks
Global Underwater Explorers, Project Baseline and NektonMission.org!
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| Our perspective: the diver tow-fish The Baseline Explorer on the horizon. |
I will post again in 3-4 days. It is midnight here and we are up at 6 to
support Team Blue!
