I was out diving today for some of the physical oceanography folks at the URI Bay Campus. I don't work for them, but I've been doing dives to help them out all winter as a favor and luckily my boss lets me do it.
They have this 3 dimensional current monitoring array called the BEAMER system consisting of two large 1500 lb tripods mounted 50 meters apart and about 200 meters offshore. The tripods both have an array of sonars aimed from one tripod to the other and using these they can make a 3D image of the currents between the two. One of the tripods was also connected to a smaller vertical looking advanced doppler current profiler (ADCP) sitting by itself on the bottom about 5 meters away. The whole system was connected by an underwater data and power cable to the dock at the URI Bay Campus.
Today's job was to recover the whole thing. We did dives to attach the lifting lines to the tripods so the ship could hoist them, and also removed the smaller separate ADCP and brought that up with a lift bag.
All of that went smoothly and we thought we were done diving. However, as they were pulling the 200 m data cable up it snagged on something. Back in the water we go! I think I may be a little too obsessed with diving because there we were snagged up, things were going wrong, and my gut reaction was "Cool! I get to go back in the water!"
Earlier in the day this long time URI Bay Campus resident who was on the boat with us had been talking about this lost UW Habitat that URI had deployed back in the 1970s somewhere off of the Bay Campus. The original plan had been to have someone live in it for a month, but it never happened and the habitat was eventually abandoned. This guy had looked for it in the past but never found it.
Right before I jumped in the water he said something to me like, "Wouldn't it be funny if it was the old UW Habitat that we snagged on."
Sure enough my buddy and I followed the cable down and we found ourselves face to face this thing about the size of an old Apollo space capsule (but shaped more like a barrel), heavily encrusted, but pretty much fitting the description the guy had given of this lost UW habitat! The only bummer was that the ship pulling the cable was fighting the current and trying not to break this expensive data line while we were freeing it so we had to just do the job and come straight up. I only got to spend maybe a minute on the thing but I'll definitely have to go out there and see if I can find it again some day and really investigate it.
Considering the size of this thing it was astonishing that anyone actually thought they were going to live in it for a month. Though I suppose since they never actually used it, they must have come to their senses!
They have this 3 dimensional current monitoring array called the BEAMER system consisting of two large 1500 lb tripods mounted 50 meters apart and about 200 meters offshore. The tripods both have an array of sonars aimed from one tripod to the other and using these they can make a 3D image of the currents between the two. One of the tripods was also connected to a smaller vertical looking advanced doppler current profiler (ADCP) sitting by itself on the bottom about 5 meters away. The whole system was connected by an underwater data and power cable to the dock at the URI Bay Campus.
Today's job was to recover the whole thing. We did dives to attach the lifting lines to the tripods so the ship could hoist them, and also removed the smaller separate ADCP and brought that up with a lift bag.
All of that went smoothly and we thought we were done diving. However, as they were pulling the 200 m data cable up it snagged on something. Back in the water we go! I think I may be a little too obsessed with diving because there we were snagged up, things were going wrong, and my gut reaction was "Cool! I get to go back in the water!"
Earlier in the day this long time URI Bay Campus resident who was on the boat with us had been talking about this lost UW Habitat that URI had deployed back in the 1970s somewhere off of the Bay Campus. The original plan had been to have someone live in it for a month, but it never happened and the habitat was eventually abandoned. This guy had looked for it in the past but never found it.
Right before I jumped in the water he said something to me like, "Wouldn't it be funny if it was the old UW Habitat that we snagged on."
Sure enough my buddy and I followed the cable down and we found ourselves face to face this thing about the size of an old Apollo space capsule (but shaped more like a barrel), heavily encrusted, but pretty much fitting the description the guy had given of this lost UW habitat! The only bummer was that the ship pulling the cable was fighting the current and trying not to break this expensive data line while we were freeing it so we had to just do the job and come straight up. I only got to spend maybe a minute on the thing but I'll definitely have to go out there and see if I can find it again some day and really investigate it.
Considering the size of this thing it was astonishing that anyone actually thought they were going to live in it for a month. Though I suppose since they never actually used it, they must have come to their senses!
