I saw Alex at the base of the stairs as I was coming down to get my breakfast. He just said 'we are going to release it in ten minutes' full of excitement and walking in a hurry. The seas had calmed down over night and we were at the position of the first mooring!
I eat as fast as I could. I normally would have skipped breakfast so I would not miss any of the action, but empty stomach for a bad sailor is a recipe for disaster. I donned my float jacket, baklava and all that, as I knew I would be out in the cold for a while.
My job on the whole deal was to produce a video of the recovery. I am pretty happy with the results, and now I will wait until we get on land to post it. I had a good idea of what the recovery was going to be like since Jim Ryder (there are two Jim in our group) gave a briefing about the whole process. I am amazed how things were just like Jim explained. I even used the audio of the briefing in the video to explain what is happening.
I am ready to take some videos and snap some pictures of the mooring recovery
I headed for the bridge, were we can have a full 360 degrees view of the ocean. We needed to find the two large orange buoys or the smaller yellow plastic casing of the glass buoys (a description of the moorings on the March 18 journal entry). Alex said it takes 2 to 3 minutes between the release and the appearance of the first buoy. This is a stress full moment, as we search for the floats. The release mechanisms might fail (that is why we put two and not only one), or the mooring might have detached anytime since it was placed last year. We will not get a single datum if we do not recover the equipment. It is all or nothing!
At bout five minutes after the release Buzz spotted the orange buoy ahead of us next to a small ice patch. A couple of minutes later the other buoys popped up.
Beautiful and relaxing sight of the mooring buoys at the surface.
I rushed down in time to capture the ship's approach to the mooring. Jim used a 12 feet pickup pennant to hook the buoy and took the rope to the A-frame.
The mooring team is attempting to hook the mooring buoy
The first buoy was lifted with the A-frame
Palmer's A-frame lifting the first buoy
Jim and Barry removed it from the cable in a very elaborate dance. They first had to attach the mooring line to another winch before removing the buoy. Then they reattached the mooring line to the A-frame to keep pulling the instruments. They removed the line to the smaller winch and pull the next item on the line. They removed the oceanographic instruments as they arrived on deck and sent them inside. The buoys were placed on rubber tires. The hoisting continued. A very well orchestrated choreography that brought invaluable data onboard.
You can see in the next picture that the current meter is part of the line of the mooring. Jim, on the left, added a green rope and attached it to the small winch. They needed to remove the current meter and the yellow glass buoys without letting go of the mooring line, since there were other instruments attached to it. Perhaps the most amazing thing was to see Jim perform all this work with bare hands in the cold air and frigid water.
Jim is detaching a current meter from the mooring's line.
There was a small accident that could have been very bad. At one point the ship moved faster than one of the cables allowed and it snapped. It was so fast that Barry, who was closest to the line, had not time to react. Luckily it did not harm him.
We sailed a few hours to the second mooring. Jim, Alex and Buzz spent some time listening to the release and triangulating until they found it. We were loosing daylight thanks to a heavily overcast sky. We were having trouble finding the buoys form the bridge under those conditions. It was very tense up there in the bridge. Nancy, aided by binoculars, spotted the buoys quite far from the ship. A big sigh of relief was heard.
The second recovery went smoother, even when there was less light and some snow. Alex is extremely happy to have recovered both moorings. The instruments are expensive, but it is the data inside them that make them so much more valuable. The plan is to open them on Tuesday, once the mooring team has had tome to rest after three long and stressful days for them.
Overcast sky with some snow made the second recovery a bit darker