More Technical Difficulties

June 27th, 2010

So we were riding along on our merry way down the Mississippi when fate handed us a bad card. The streamer got caught on something underwater. We got the boat to stop in time so that we didn't run over it but still created enough stress on it that the streamer snapped. Then when the Tiger Shark started reeling it in from the buoy end of things...the rope also snapped. This left out poor streamer caught underwater. We tried searching for it with a boat hook and then a grappling hook that the chief engineer quickly constructed but to no avail. The next day they sent another small boat with sonar mapping to go look for it and the good news is that its still caught at the same place and hasn't started drifting down to Louisiana, the bad news is they still weren't able to get it up. Luckily we had a spare streamer which is a bit older on board so we're still collecting data.

Interestingly enough when we compared the last couple hundred meters of data we collected with the first streamer to the first few hundred we collected with the second streamer, the second streamer gave us much better results! The streamers are identical in theory and the area we covered was the same so I would like to believe that it was my amazing processing skills that made the difference since I only did the second line, but its rather unlikely. 

Today I also had the opportunity to take Brian (our hydrologist and my co-buoy-watcher) through all the steps that we do to process the data beginning with creating a .nav file from our gps and geode information all the way through an fk migration. It was great because by teaching it I discovered a lot of small details I had never questioned before and Brian asked great questions so Steffen came over to help us really understand a lot of the different steps. As a result even though I thought I had a great grasp of what was going on, I now have an even better understanding of why we do so many steps. We could even stop it between each new module so that we could see the difference between the before and after.  

We did have a small hiccup today with the airgun when it stopped shooting properly. We brought it on deck and indoors and Steffen began taking it completely apart while all of us watched. He replaced a couple o-rings, cleaned, and lubricated everything and we were set to go. It started working just fine after that. So although this gave us a small time delay (about an hour) I was glad that I got to see what the inside of the airgun looks like and how it all works together.