Scotscar Log - July 20, 2001

Friday, July 20, 2001

Even 5 foot seas can't stop the Mighty Caleta and her scientific crew. Seas actually dropped to about 4.5 feet early in the day. But the big difference from yesterday was that the period increased from 4.5 seconds to 7.5 seconds. Seems that being dropped 5 feet every 7.5 seconds is a lot easier to take. Even a single line of CTD data could be used to validate Hernan's forecast. It was the perfect set up. A big storm passing through in the middle of forecast cycle 3. North east winds. How far was the water going to downwell? Where was the downwelling front going to be? The biologists wanted to know. They were getting ready for their nighttime bioluminescence sampling.

Past experience told us the front would quickly move past the nodes, leaving only warm surface water behind. And it did just that. Front went by yesterday in an elapsed time of about 1 hour. Temps jumped from 13C to 22 C. Ok, so now it was offshore, but where? Past experience again told us that it wasn't going past the end of our sampling lines, so we would find it if we could get out. Hernan's forecast said it would move farther offshore along the shallower southern lines. About ¾ of the way out the line. So where was it? The biologists wanted to know, and the Caleta crew wanted to find out.

By about 11:00 am we had waited long enough. Capt. Mike said seas aren't getting any better, its time to go. No sense in waiting any longer. John Wiggins set up a video link to a camera we mounted looking out on the back deck. We would freewave it home to field station, and display the video feed locally on one of our computer screens. Then we would beam whatever was on that screen out over the web with another video link. The 3 hour tour of the Caleta would be broadcast live. Capt. Mike, Mike, Krisite and Alex loaded the boat, powered up the computers, and headed out.

The show was wild. 45 degrees one way, then 45 degrees the other. We were marking the rolls on the TV screen from the comfort of the cool room. Too rough for the ADCP. Sorry Bob. But we only needed the CTD section to find the front, and the minibat was working fine. It is towed behind the vessel, and uses a set of wings to fly up and down through the water column. Kristie found it was too rough for the autopilot, so she'd have to fly it herself. Mike made his way out on the back deck, and gave us a good show deploying the minibat and not himself.

Part way out came the first call. COOLroom, COOLroom. Caleta here. We just got hit by a wave, it got in around the closed window, and poured water on the ADCP monitor. Ok, turn it off, we said. We'll log in from here and clean things up. From the COOLroom, over the freewave, Sage logged into the ADCP computer, saw everything was OK, and shut it down. Second call was we just fell into a deep trough, and the CTD computer crashed. They couldn't tell if they lost the data, and if their entire effort was wasted. Again Sage logged in over the freewave from the COOLroom, grabbed the data, and passed it on to Chhaya to put it up on the web. Finally the calls started getting better, like we found the warm side of the front, about 2/3 of the way out. Or, we're at the end, and the bottom temp is 12.5C. Hernan started counting contours on his model section plots. 12.5C at the bottom at the end of the S1 line. Hernan smiled. The boat crew apologized to Hernan for all the names they called him on the way out.