Shallow, Daytime OBS Recovery

Here's a video of one of the recoveries in the daytime. This one was in a fairly shallow area, and so it had a lot of 'hitchhikers'. The deeper OBS's came back pretty clean, if not a bit of mud inside. Blogger seems to really eat the quality of the video, but you get the idea.
Warning: It's LOUD...I'm still trying to filter the audio, this was after I reduced the audio by 25%...not enough yet!

Making Sense of it All

   We all survived the voyage on the New Horizon, even the stormy seas that knocked objects on the floors and tossed people into walls.  All of the OBS's were successfully recovered and the scientists and technicians have begun the daunting task of calibrating and interpreting the data.  Now as we compile the footage and decide how to present our wealth of knowledge and experience the bigger picture of our mission unfolds.  How do we share this experience with the people of the North American West Coast in a way that is meaningful, informative, and not boring?  Wish us luck and feel free to make comments!

Daily Grind

Now that we can walk a straight line on land, we've been going through all the footage from the trip and categorizing it. We're working on a script for the narrative for the movie so that we can get a good idea of what sort of footage and animations will be needed to illustrate it. I'm excited to make animations for the concepts, and I've got more ideas in my head than I'll ever be able to make. Erik and Dean are much better at expressing the ideas verbally and giving me an idea of the visual representations for them. We plan to complete a script first, and then collect and create the video to go along with it. We came up with some titles for the documentary and we have some favorites, but we may have a poll here on the blog if we can't decide between a few. So much to do!

Back on Land

Thanks to a wonderful group of scientists and crew, dependable design of the OBS, and smooth seas, we completed the recovery days ahead of time and arrived in Newport yesterday morning.


Being off the ship is a bit strange as it still feels like everything should be moving. I can't seem to help walking like Jack Sparrow.

I'm looking forward to seeing all the video we took and making it into a movie to illustrate just how profound the experience has been. I'll miss the R/V New Horizon and her crew!

Fishing

There's a pretty long distance between the 12th and 13th sites, so today I've been keeping an eye on the fishing lines hoping for another fresh albacore dinner. I think Anna and I have gotten the hang of standing in one place as the ship moves. Here's my first experiment with editing the video, trying for a small file size...watch the horizon!

Erik has been interviewing the crew and other scientists. The engines are pretty loud so we are planning to do some of the interviews when we get to Newport tomorrow. It's hard to believe that it's almost over!
Here fishy fishy!

Sunday, 15-July, 15:39 local time: After our 4 am recovery, we sailed northwest, towards the next site, offshore of Vancouver Island. Unfortunately, high winds streaming along a ridge between high pressure in the Gulf of Alaska and a low off California brought high seas, reducing safety on the main deck and postponing that recovery. We, instead, sailed past this site to the northernmost station, thus buying some time. This strategy worked, recovery at the northernmost site was fast and efficient. We now cruise towards the last site on this line with following seas, a nice ride at last.

Ahead of Schedule

We just pulled in the 9th OBS about lunchtime. So far everything has gone pretty smooth, and there's talk that if it continues to go as nice as it has that we will get back to Newport sometime on Wednesday.

The weather has been pretty nice considering we are way out at sea, the photo shows some downtime in the sunshine with Erik soaking it up with a book on the main deck.
There's about four hours until the next site, headed south now from Vancouver Island. This morning there were several giant container ships around, its amazing how big those things are.