Dave and Brian's Excellent Adventures

Day 8 - The Black Sea Expedition

Friday May 19, 2006

Well, the tally is: One helicopter, one plane, and three ships. Not too shabby. Now we’ve checked out all of the sites found that had an interesting return on the side scans that were done in the weeks previous. The only option is to re-scan areas that weren’t done, and find more. That means removing Hercules and Argus from the end of the winch and hooking up Echo. Echo is the name of the vehicle used to side scan. That means the whole vehicle is filled with one big sonar device. Echo is lowered about 10 meters off the bottom of the ocean floor and dragged behind the ship in a pattern called, “Mowing the Lawn”. In other words, they drive over an area one way, take a quick left 180 degrees, and drive over the same area but a little farther to one side of the area just scanned. This way they can feel pretty confident that the area that’s been scanned has been well covered.

Since the vehicles with cameras on it are on deck (Echo doesn’t have a camera) then the video position isn’t needed. Instead I get to take a tour of the engine room (Please check back later, as I have to wait until we’re in port to be able to take pictures, and I’ll post them). On the Ronald H Brown, you’ll remember that it was an electric ship. The engine room with took up the lower two decks of the ship, were filled with 6 big Caterpillar Diesel engines that created enough electricity to power a small city. The electricity was used to drive the three Z-drives under the ship. The Endeavor is different.

The Chief Engineer, Billy, was nice enough to take me on a tour. He described the entire ship as an engine room: The main engine that drives the propeller is below-aft, the electric engines are below-forward, the front bow thruster is below the electric engines, the back-up generator is behind the wheelhouse, the hydraulics and water filtration system are behind the berthing area, above the main engine, etc.

The Endeavor carries 56,500 gallons of diesel fuel, which, at full power, could last 30 days. For water, there is a reverse osmosis system that actually pulls in seawater and converts it to drinkable water. There is also a evaporation system, as seawater is used to cool the engines, whatever steam comes off of them is condensed and collected. The main engine that drives the boat is the size of Lincoln Town Car: It’s HUGE! The pistons inside are about the size of a dinner plate, and there are 16 of them. The engine displacement is 675 cubic inches per cylinder, which means it has a total of 10,800 cubic inches of pure power.

On the Ronald H Brown, you might remember that there were Z-drives that were electric and pushed the ship around. What made this special was that each drive could rotate 360 degrees. The ship could actually move laterally, or rotate around a center axis, if the captain so chose to. The Endeavor has a variable-pitch propeller which means the propeller blades are always facing the aft end of the ship, but the blades can rotate along a horizontal access. Now, if you don’t understand that, don’t be concerned. Just ask me about it the next time you see me, it’s kind of a visual thing.

posted by DaveandBrian @ 11:21 PM