Dave and Brian's Excellent Adventures

Black Sea 2007, Day 25

This is Echo. As you’ll notice this is an old picture. We will be going by Stromboli, on our return trip to Italy. But that’s a week away. Actually 6 Days, 11 hours, 12 minutes, but who’s counting? Not me.

We’ve been very lucky the last couple of days, despite not having a working bow-thruster, the crew has worked very hard to hold the ship on station during our dives with Argus and Hercules. It is obviously very difficult to try and get a ship this size to stay put on a moving body of water.

Now that the wind has kicked up and the waves are getting wavier, it’s becoming an impossible task. What has been happening is we get close to the wreck, start working, the ship loses control and we spend the next 45 minutes to an hour trying to get back on station. It’s very frustrating, as we have no control over the situation, and we know the bridge is working incredibly hard to try and get us back on station. So, we go with plan B: Echo.

Echo is a side-scan sonar, which sends out sound waves. When the sound waves come back it produces an image. This image can be interpreted and analyzed by sonar specialists, who can see certain targets. Later we can take Hercules and Argus down and look at the targets found. Sometimes we find a wreck, sometimes we find a refrigerator. If we dragged Hercules and Argus along the sea floor, we can go about a knot. If we drag Echo along the sea floor, it can go up to 2 knots. This allows us to cover a wider area, in less time.

posted by DaveandBrian @ 3:55 AM