| P-MAN XIV Update #18 - The ROV's last mission 04 April 2012 Here's a little taste of our field work in the jungle: Dingar has made its final voyage for P-MAN XIV this year. The ROV team has two more days in Palau, but you can't come all the way around the world and not visit the Peleliu battlefields and ancient Palauan sites on Babelthuap. Since the justification for the school district allowing the team to take this trip is education, by golly they're going to be educated and not just play in the water. BentProp broke with tradition and had pancake Wednesday. It felt like pancake Sunday to all of us, so we had them. No, demanded them. But also breaking with tradition, Flip controlled portion sizes so none of us had more than two or three dozen pancakes. With bacon, and two - count them, two - kinds of real maple syrup. First lessons learned, though: paper towels are not all equal. Some stick to microwave bacon more than others. Fuzzy bacon is not altogether appealing to the breakfast crowd. We briefed with the ROV team with Buck taking the reigns for this final mission. The ROVers took our van to transport Dingar back to Neco Marine and said they would pick us up when they were ready. No need to have us looking over their shoulders prodding them to "hurry up" even if we were saying "take your time." We got a little more coffee into us, but not just any kind of coffee. We had NgSmartCoffeech®©™??? (the Ng and ch are silent in Palauan.) We get into all sorts of discussion both in the jungle and out on the water. One conversation was how to make coffee more healthy, yet still get the boost from the caffeine. Hard to get rid of the diuretic effect, but maybe we can offset it. I mean what's the point of decaffeinated coffee anyway. So in a flash, NgSmartCoffeech®©™??? was born. I can't tell you the secret ingredients that were added, but our test subjects couldn't tell the difference between Starbucks Dark French Roast and our new and improved NgSmartCoffeech®©™??? (Remember, the Ng and ch are silent.). Down to the dock, load up the equipment and off we went. Our final trip to a point where the AUV saw an interesting piece of 'not ocean bottom.' A piece of a B-24? That's why we're here. To check it out. Today, the ROV team looked and acted totally different than the previous mission. They took their lessons learned to heart. Where before they were tired and disorganized, with the predictable mistakes being made the previous day, today they were sharp, organized and on the ball. They realized that when they shorted themselves a team member, they could not stay focused. So, the entire engineering team went on board plus one from the marketing team. Jenny's role/job for the day was to ensure checklists were done properly, keep the log of activities, ensure that everyone took water breaks and cracked the whip when it needed cracking. This kept the engineers engineering.
What was amazing to see was the calm determination of the entire team. When the bot started down, the line tender kept the lines tended, the driver kept driving and the communicator kept communicating. When the sonar had a wiring issue, Scott calmly grabbed his pliers, heat shrink, soldering iron, and an extra hand to hold stuff, and made a significant repair in the field. Team work was in abundance. But the sea is a harsh mistress and Dingar lost power to the thrusters again. But the camera still worked. So between Joe driving and drifting the boat, and the ROV team raising and lowering the cable, Dingar still managed to image the ocean floor, half a world away from home. Now we have 3200 still photos of the ocean bottom to analyze. The reason Dingar had its issues was due to a field mod born out of necessity. Since salt water is denser than fresh, the team needed to boost the power to the thrusters. To do that, they needed to add more wire from the control station to Dingar. The cable/connector they had could not handle any more internally, so they had to run wires external to the cable and into the connector. That added wire in the connector broke the watertight seal and no amount of silicone or epoxy could overcome water pressure at depth. The ocean is a tough environment.
But you can't buy training like this. The ROV team will return to Michigan with a new set of ideas on how to press forward with their program and hopefully, blow the competition out of the water at the next Underwater match up. When we pulled the ROV out of the water, we decided to dive the lat/long and see if we got lucky. We still haven't seen our item of interest except on the AUV video feed and its side scanning sonar. So, Dan volunteered to stay on the boat as safety officer while Pat, Derek and I dove to the bottom. We try not to dive below 100 feet. It's not that we can't. It's just that we're a long way from home IF something were to go wrong. So we planned our dive with redundant safety steps thrown in. Joe placed a small buoy (water bottle on fishing line attached to a two pound scuba weight) on the lat/long. When all three of us were in the water, I led the group down. At 20 feet, I thought I could see the bottom. I thought this would be a piece of cake. At 50 feet, the bottom I saw was no closer. I looked behind me and Pat and Derek were still following at a close distance. At 100 feet I noticed the water turned from blue to tan(ish). Ah, the bottom must be close. Derek said that one moment he saw me, then the next, my yellow flipper simply disappeared. And he said so did Pat. Like a scene from a sci-fi movie, we were gone.
I made it to the bottom where the visibility was two feet at the most. My dive computer said the bottom was 115 feet. I had the bottom to myself for a moment. Then Pat edged into view. Derek said he leveled out at 100 feet to see if we would reappear. Then he too slipped into the monster's maw. He came into view on the bottom and all three of us had the same thought at the same time. I signaled to the group that we would cancel this dive and head back up. It's not that you can't search in poor visibility conditions, it's just simpler to have discussed it earlier since there was more than one of us. From the ROV video, we thought the viz would have been better. So Dingar, even in a handicapped state, could get better imagery than the human eyeball. I popped my bright orange signaling sausage, sent it to the surface and we started up. Out of the tan and into the blue. Then the surface appeared above us. We stopped at 30 feet for a minute, and then did our safety stop for three minutes at 15 feet. Just in case something went right on the bottom, (finding our target and staying down a bit too long looking at it) Joe hung a spare tank and regulator on the anchor line at 30 feet. We didn't need it. Back on the boat, we debriefed and battened down the hatches and headed home. Enroute, Joe took the ROV team to spots that they could spearfish. Wes now has a real Palauan spear, for fishing, and made great use of it spearing the ocean bottom. A few more folks tried, we did not obtain dinner this way, and headed back to Neco Marine. Extensive debrief on the boat which included asking the ROV team what BentProp could do better. An exchange of information was beneficial to both teams.
At 7pm, 1900 for us 24 hour people, The Stockbridge High School Team put on a presentation on the school's robotics program at Sam's Tours. Sam has been very helpful to us over the years and Pat has given update presentations on The BentProp Project every few years. This year, the audience got to learn about ROVs. The students covered how they got the idea to come to Palau, and what they've accomplished since they've been here. At the end of the presentation they were inundated with questions by the audience.
We hosted the ROV team to a 'thank you and good bye' dinner at a famous Palauan restaurant. The specialty of the house is Fruit Bat Soup. Three fruit bats were ordered and Barb is the confirmed fruit bat eating champion of the group. We thought Joe would have three fruit bats in front of him, but he only got one and a half. Everyone turned in early as the Stockbridge contingent would be heading to Peleliu and BentProp would take our freshly repaired SSS unit out to sea. That is if the weather was conducive to it. And that story will be told in tomorrow's update. |
- Main Site
- Expeditions
- Our Story
- Miscellany
