Day 3 - The Black Sea Expedition
Sunday May 14, 2006
We were picked up by Sergei who was happy to announce to us he had replaced the fuel pump on his car, and “Everything OK”. After checking in with customs (or rather we walked into the customs building, and a gentleman in a uniform waved us through) we finally boarded the ship.
Welcome to the R/V Endeavor! It’s a research vessel owned and operated by the University of Rhode Island. It’s 120’ long (unlike the Ronald H. Brown at 290’) and has bunks for 28 people (unlike 75). I’m sharing a berth with Bruce, the 2nd Mate (Pecking order on board a ship: Captain, Chief Mate, 2nd Mate, etc). The berth is small, but it’s OK, as it’s really just a place to store our personal stuff and sleep. Because, basically, that’s all there is room for!
On the Ronald H Brown, when we went to Lost City in 2005, we had 5 containers, called vans (as some of you might remember). There was a storage van, Tool van, Satellite van, and the Image and Control van sat next to each other. On this expedition, it’s a smaller ship, we took 1 van: The Control van. This is the van that contains all the video equipment, the computers that talk to the ROVs and where the pilot sits. If you remember the Image van was the van right next to the Control van, that housed the scientists working on the expedition. All the Image van is comprised of is a set of three plasma screens and a desk filled with intercom panels and smaller LCD screens. The plasmas and desk were removed from the Image van back at URI, and mounted in one of the labs. Black curtains were hung up to separate the rest of the ship from “Image van”, mostly to provide a nice dark environment for the scientists to watch the video coming from the ROVs.
The Tool van is merely a place to keep all the tools and parts they might need to work on the ROVs to fix or modify them. The contents of the Tool van were removed and placed inside the wet lab. The Satellite van is a van filled with four racks of equipment and has a separate platform with a satellite dish on it. The four racks were minimized to 2 and placed in the same lab as the “Image van”. The platform with the satellite dish is now sitting on top of the Control van. The storage van and it’s contents were left back at URI. If you haven’t figured it out by now, it’s a little cramped.
Unlike on the Ronald H Brown, where we cabled up the ship on the transit from Woods Hole to the Lost City, Tom Perley and Jeff Holt cabled up the ship before it left in March. After it left URI, it went to France and picked up a completely different science team that has absolutely nothing to do with our expedition. This group had their own expedition and then hopped off the ship in April, where a skeleton crew from IFE came on board to get ready for side-scan work.
Over the last several weeks the crew has been dragging a piece of equipment, called Echo, behind them. All Echo does is send out radar signals and collect data from what the radar has found. In this case they were pointing Echo at the bottom of the Black Sea. The data is transferred to a computer that interpolates the information gathered a makes drawings of what’s on the sea floor, like a map. Most of the time the map looks flat and therefore uninteresting. Now and again a bump will show up on the map. This bump could be a rock, a mound of sand that forms a small underwater hill, or a Russian destroyer that was damaged in World War II (the scientists and Ukrainians are very excited to look at that!). The big find would be finding the Armenia. This was a ship that was torpedoed by the Germans in WWII, and 7000 people lost their lives, as this massive ship sunk in 10 minutes. Most of the people on board were wounded Russian soldiers, being transferred to a hospital.
So, now we have the pilots for Hercules and Argus on board, and we’ll go back to each location and take a look at what some of the bumps are. While we’re looking around, we’ll have a boat that has been dubbed the “Hotel Boat”. This will be a cruise ship that will follow us around filled with crew for us (again only 28 bunks) and Ukrainian officials. This is the first time an expedition like this has occurred where an ROV has gone to search the Black Sea. Obviously this has peaked the interest of many Ukrainians, especially the military. I believe I heard the last day we’ll be visited by the Ukrainian First Lady. That should be interesting.
Unlike during the Lost City Expedition, where we used the 5 day transfer time to get acclimated with the ship and the Control Van and wire the ship for production, I got on the ship at 10 am, we left the dock at 6 pm, and were in the water at 8 pm. Having not seen the Control Van since January (4 months ago) and not being there when the ship was wired, the learning curve was very high. But, off we go!
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