Deer Deep Reeders,
Well its been three days since my last post. We are currently smack in the middle of a 5 day Drilling Project leg. This is the other group whose site is about 120 miles from ours. After much rangling and negotiations, it seems our group will get two more dives on the Axial Volcano. There hasn’t been much going on for me here, except a lot of down time. Well, down time isn’t quite the right term. Fix time. Everytime I try to fix something two other things break. It really takes the motivation out of blogging and whatnot. To give a quick numbers run by of problems faced by me, either fixed or not right now:
-2 problematic low pressure pumps
-5 faulty high pressure pumps (2 repaired so far)
-1 freezing up data collecting computer (replaced with my laptop so I’m typing this on Scott’s Laptop)
-2 water baths that don’t reach full temperature (out of 2, but I think I have a work around)
-Instrument issues, reading that I have more oxygen at the outlet than the inlet (not physically possible)
-Oh, and the partridge fell out of the pear tree.
Sigh. Other than constantly challenging my underwhelming electrical and plumbing skills, the cruise is going pretty smoothly right now. I can’t do all the controls and calibrations I’ve been trying to get, but a 5 day downtime means I probably can get to the bottom of some of these issues. And currently I do have a working system. I have absolutely nothing in back up right now that works, so I’m hope hope hoping the rest of this holds on for a few more days. I think of this as trying to coax a 300000 mile, 1981 honda civic through the Sierra Nevada mountains on a one way trip to California. If you can get through those last few uphills, it can pretty much coast into the driveway, and you can sell it for scraps if necessary.
-2 problematic low pressure pumps
-5 faulty high pressure pumps (2 repaired so far)
-1 freezing up data collecting computer (replaced with my laptop so I’m typing this on Scott’s Laptop)
-2 water baths that don’t reach full temperature (out of 2, but I think I have a work around)
-Instrument issues, reading that I have more oxygen at the outlet than the inlet (not physically possible)
-Oh, and the partridge fell out of the pear tree.
Sigh. Other than constantly challenging my underwhelming electrical and plumbing skills, the cruise is going pretty smoothly right now. I can’t do all the controls and calibrations I’ve been trying to get, but a 5 day downtime means I probably can get to the bottom of some of these issues. And currently I do have a working system. I have absolutely nothing in back up right now that works, so I’m hope hope hoping the rest of this holds on for a few more days. I think of this as trying to coax a 300000 mile, 1981 honda civic through the Sierra Nevada mountains on a one way trip to California. If you can get through those last few uphills, it can pretty much coast into the driveway, and you can sell it for scraps if necessary.
Also, we’ve had some heavy Sees out here, with sets coming through up to 15 feet. The Alvin recovery two days ago was impressive to say the least. The roughest I’ve ever seen. Here, I’ll show you. Oh, and Dave the pilot had his very first full fledged dive in it! He got hit with buckets of icy water by the whole Alvin group, and was given one to douse himself.
You know its a rough day if you need hard hats to drive around in a little boat.
This is Mark's High Pressure System. He's had some pressure issues, but now he's up and holding. Go Mark!
May your days low pressure and low stress, unlike mine (haha double pun).
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