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After starting out in 20 foot seas with 30 knots of wind,
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Herman/Chin and Co. have settled into a coring routine. As of yesterday
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afternoon the winds were still around 25 to 30 knots but the seas were down
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to 5-6 feet. They have not done any sidescan or camera work as of yet. I
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receive updates twice a day, once around 9 am and then again around 4 pm.
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Update as of 11/02/94 0800 hrs: wind 30 kts gusts to 40, seas 10-14
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feet, unable to conduct testing, except for profiling, due to adverse weather
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conditions. Waiting for break in weather pattern. Should break no later than
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tomorrow.
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11/02/94 1615 hours, 37 degrees 25.6 min north 123 degrees 14.7 min
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west wind 35-40 knots from the nw seas 20 plus feet skys are clear and
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visibility good. Continuing with profiling. Weather continues to be a problem
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for testing. Still waiting for a break in weather pattern.
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11/04/94 0800 hours Just passed under Golden Gate bridge. Testing
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has been completed. ETA Redwood City 1030-1100 hours this morning.
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All of you have been following the cruise of the Pacific Escort
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through Steve Wallace's e-mail accounts -- well we made it back safe and
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sound! The purpose of the cruise was to characterize a reference site as part
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of the EPA deep-ocean dumpsite project. Yes we exerienced 40 knot winds and 20
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foot seas. Thank goodness the cruise was only scheduled for 6 days and not a
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month! You know, for the past several years I have sat in duck blinds during
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this time of the year and experienced nothing but blue skies. The first season
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I'm not duck hunting and what happens! I think that Kaye Kinoshita was the only
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non-green person on board as she calmly navigated us through the worst of it
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(personally I was wishing that a rogue wave would put me out of my misery that
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first day out). We did manage, however, to get a fair share of our very
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ambitious workload done. We collected 7 excellent cores using Mike Bothnar's
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Slow Corer. This is a hydraulically dampened corer that preserves the
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water-sediment interface. This is the first time the apparatus has been used
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in the deep ocean (in the past Mike only used in Boston Harbor/Mass Bay). Mike
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learned alot about improving the core for such open ocean work. (Mike actually
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told me that he's glad that he came on the cruise and enjoyed working with all
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of us! I guess it must be worse working in the Altantic in February!). Anyhow,
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the Slow Corer worked beautifully. We occupied several other sampling sites
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and had no recovery. This didn't surprise us as sediment cover was very thin
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to unresolvable on the acoustic records. We covered the study area and got
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good representative samples -- this was the priority task of the cruise for
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EPA. We also collected some sidescan data with the EG&G system. We had planned
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a mosaic but weather didn't leave us the time. We did run representative lines
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across the study area. The new cage that we had built for the EG&G fish worked
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very well. Unfortunately, the SeaMac winch couldn't handle the cage in the
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heavy sea states and we had to use the "naked" fish with a resultant decrease
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in the data quality. We have plenty of high-resolution subbottom data using
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the ODEC system and will be able to acoustically characterize the study site
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very well. We weren't able to deploy the camera sled (as we concentrated our
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time on sampling and sidescan in the weather windows available to us) although
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Hank was ready when needed (we do have a camera transect through the area from
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a previous cruise). Ironically, the camera sled was first on the agenda and
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ready to go when we reached the study area, but weather didn't permit us to
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launch it. All-in-all, we came away with a good data set for our EPA
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client/partner.
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The GIS whiz-kids -- Norm Maher and Mike Hamer -- produced a set of
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labor-intensive maps at sea that are ready to go in the report. We also used
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the new digital camera to good effect.
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My thanks to our scientific and support crew. Everyone worked hard (at times
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above and beyond the call of duty) through a very difficult cruise. Spirits
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remained high throughout the cruise and everyone pulled together to make the
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cruise a success. The freezer full of Hagen Daas ice cream didn't seem to
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hurt team morale one bit either!
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This was the first real scientific cruise for the Pacific Escort (sister ship
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of the Lee). The captain and ship's crew were extremely cooperative and wanted
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very much to make it a successful cruise. Everything was done with a smile.
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MarFac did yeoman work in mobilizing and demobing for this cruise. My thanks to
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everyone involved!
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This hard work by everyone has resulted in building a high degree of trust with
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the other agencies.
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