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alikiWe spend the fifth day beam trawling, which is basically dropping this net off the back of the boat down to the ocean bottom, and collecting whatever gets caught in it. We only do it for 10 to 15-minute periods, so that whatever does get caught, we can identify and measure, and throw them back into the ocean, mostly alive (commercial guys trawl for an hour, so whatever lifeform is in the net is mostly dead by the time it arrives on deck).
Here are the scientists sorting through our catches. They are arguing about which species of hake they are looking at.
On the sixth day, with the failing generator and lack of cable support to lift the ROV, the scientists (heading the project) make the executive decision to sacrifice beam-trawling time out at sea for the more important ROV-time. So we head 10 hours to the closest shore, spend 12 hours to obtain what we need (at this point I am just aimlessly wandering around the docks, talking to strangers in a frighteningly-scary tone. I really miss seeing a female.) 10 hours back to sea, we arrive on the seventh day.
But the head engineer cites numerous reasons for not deploying the ROV, including (1) choppy seas, (2) oncoming storm to worsen conditions, (3) too small a vessel, (4) insecurity with the generator being fixed, and (5) an inexperienced crew. Because it's work-sensitive, I won't go into what us scientists think, but understandably, we are very upset. Our research is going down the drain at this point. We try to reason with the engineers, but it's a firm no. So we trawl some more, haplessly (because trawling is only 10% of what we were supposed to accomplish):
We stare at stuff like this and pretend to be excited, but our spirits are really deflated.
My advisor gets excited when we see an armored searobin, though. He's so excited, he decides to stick it in the freezer and figure out what to do with it later. (We actually carry this searobin back in a ziplock bag, in the back of our pick-up truck, for a four hour drive from New Haven, CT to south Jersey, and yes, it smells awful when we arrive).
Eighth day, we fish. Here's a crew member with a tilefish (I am mildly comforted by the fact that at least I got to see what those damn things look like, if not through the ROV...) Apparently they taste just like lobster.
And you might not believe it from this picture, but we actually saw more than two dozen pods of dolphins in the four days we were at sea (the other four days we wasted at various docks, during the mobilization phase and the emergency unscheduled stop to fix the generator and get cable)...
But fishing for tilefish and dolphin sightings do not make up for the fact that the fucking ROV never even made it into the water...which was what the goal of all of this was in the first place.
Here are the scientists sorting through our catches. They are arguing about which species of hake they are looking at.
On the sixth day, with the failing generator and lack of cable support to lift the ROV, the scientists (heading the project) make the executive decision to sacrifice beam-trawling time out at sea for the more important ROV-time. So we head 10 hours to the closest shore, spend 12 hours to obtain what we need (at this point I am just aimlessly wandering around the docks, talking to strangers in a frighteningly-scary tone. I really miss seeing a female.) 10 hours back to sea, we arrive on the seventh day.
But the head engineer cites numerous reasons for not deploying the ROV, including (1) choppy seas, (2) oncoming storm to worsen conditions, (3) too small a vessel, (4) insecurity with the generator being fixed, and (5) an inexperienced crew. Because it's work-sensitive, I won't go into what us scientists think, but understandably, we are very upset. Our research is going down the drain at this point. We try to reason with the engineers, but it's a firm no. So we trawl some more, haplessly (because trawling is only 10% of what we were supposed to accomplish):
We stare at stuff like this and pretend to be excited, but our spirits are really deflated.
My advisor gets excited when we see an armored searobin, though. He's so excited, he decides to stick it in the freezer and figure out what to do with it later. (We actually carry this searobin back in a ziplock bag, in the back of our pick-up truck, for a four hour drive from New Haven, CT to south Jersey, and yes, it smells awful when we arrive).
Eighth day, we fish. Here's a crew member with a tilefish (I am mildly comforted by the fact that at least I got to see what those damn things look like, if not through the ROV...) Apparently they taste just like lobster.
And you might not believe it from this picture, but we actually saw more than two dozen pods of dolphins in the four days we were at sea (the other four days we wasted at various docks, during the mobilization phase and the emergency unscheduled stop to fix the generator and get cable)...
But fishing for tilefish and dolphin sightings do not make up for the fact that the fucking ROV never even made it into the water...which was what the goal of all of this was in the first place.
