P-MAN XVI Update # 19 - Sean departs. Stockbridge arrives. Sam gets a present.

29 March 2014

The big news today was Sean Richardson heading back home. It was great having him out here. He loves the mission, has a great eye for detail, and is one of the funniest people on the planet. If he wanted to, he could have a career in stand up. But seriously folks......... He will be missed.

One last Sean smile

It's a lonely walk that starts the trip home

It's come to my attention that I've made references to some visual images, but did not provide the images so you could see them. So, in no particular order:

Nell's first airplane drawing out here

Lion Fish, poisonous but pretty

And it further comes to my attention that I used furthest in a sentence when I should have used farthest. Just wanted to clear the air and not let this grammatical error go any farther/further.

We did one dive on the Hellcat yesterday. Mostly to give Derek and Casey a chance to see it but also to try and identify more parts. We've definitely found the cockpit area. And with that, we decided not to go back for more dives on it. We've done our part. Reports are being drafted for Palauan and U.S. authorities.

It had rained on us most of the the morning and we all got a little chilled. We went back to shore and had hot lunches, looked at each other and gave the boat to the Stockbridge team for the rest of the day. They had planned on checking out their vehicles from Neco's dock, but the checkout went so well they were ready to go see something. They went to the Jake Seaplane dive spot and spent the rest of the afternoon swimming their bot in the ocean on a real airplane wreck. Their ROV worked great.

After we dropped Sean off at the airport for his evening flight to Taiwan (quite a reasonable hour compared to the other flights leaving Palau) we went to Bem Ermii for dinner.

Then to Scripps/UDel for a meeting to get more targets. No walls or void spaces from the AUV missions for us to look at, but they did give us some point targets in Malakal Harbor. But those targets would remain hidden until the next morning.

30 March

It's the next morning! We loaded a boat with all of our SCUBA gear and underwater GoPros. Pat from GoPro went with us for part of the day getting more shots for their video. We had five targets to look at. Malakal Harbor has lots of ship debris in it. The odds are that what we see as interesting targets on the SSS, are probably things we really aren't interested in. But until we see them, we can't be 100% sure.

So down we went, four times for five targets. Two were very close together. As predicted, not relevant to what we are doing: some large sections of pipe, some coral and some rocks.

Pipe, which on the SSS looked like a lawn dart.

Now we know not to go back there. However, it was a nice day on the water. That covers the happenings for me, Dan, Casey and Joe.

Pat and Derek started the morning with a brief with the Stockbridge team. One of the things we do is give feedback to them on their processes to help them create a more effective team and therefore a more productive team. Each of the BentProppers will have a chance to spend the day with the Stockbridge team from first brief, through the operations on the boat to the debrief at the end of the day. If we see something that might help them improve their performance, we tell them.

The targets for the Stockbridge team were varied. One was a 400-foot-long ship which they found and explored a bit in Malakal Harbor and the other was a point target in a channel near the Palau Pacific Resort (PPR). The reports from Derek and Pat were that the team did great. They've picked up where last year's team left off. With three returning students, the newbies do not have to recreate the wheel from scratch. The students did a great job of running the debrief, covering what they feel they did well and what they felt they needed to improve upon.

The Stockbridge ROV lost the video feed mid-dive, but as of this writing, they feel they'll have it up and running again by tomorrow morning. The off-the-shelf robot took its place and it ran like a champ, until it ran out of battery power. Just short of the second target they were looking for. All in all, a great start to this year's mission for them.

We turned ourselves around pretty fast and went to Sam's for sunset and dinner. The sky was pretty clear so the colors were not as dramatic as usual, but it was beautiful nonetheless.

Sunset at Sam's

Dan O'Brien, with his BentStar hat on, gave Sam a copy of Mark Pestana's print of the '453 B-24 that was the subject of Wil Hylton's recent book Vanished. This was for all the years of help that Sam's Tours has given us, and coincidentally, it was Sam's birthday recently.

Okay, everybody but Casey, say "Cheese." Casey, say "Hmmm."
L-R: Casey Doyle, Pat Scannon, Flip Colmer, Nell Scannon,
Dermot Keane and Sam Scott of Sam's Tours,
Dan O'Brien, Derek Abbey.
Print by Mark Pestana.

We have a returning team member showing up tonight: Bill Belcher from JPAC. How convenient that we have things to show him not only in the water, but also on land. He gets in at midnight, but someone from BentProp will pick him up.

Tomorrow, we take Bill to both the Hellcat and Avenger sites so he can start his workup of the sites. Of course we would like JPAC to start the recovery work yesterday, but realize that they have to slot these sites into their calendar taking into account current activities and already planned activities. So we'll just go back to looking for more targets that hopefully become discovered crash sites that start the process of bringing another MIA home.

- Flip

All photos © Flip Colmer 2014

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