Note: This is a guest post by Dr. Beth Orcutt, Senior Research Scientist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine. Orcutt is a participant in the ECOGIG project and will be blogging here about her experiences on the March 2013 RV Pelican ECOGIG cruise to deploy deep-sea landers in the Gulf of Mexico
ECOGIG: March '13 cruise Blog Entry #7
This morning I posted about the highs of a research expedition - when a deployment goes smoothly. Tonight I write about one of the lows of a research expedition - getting foiled (again!) by the weather. One of the final operations of this short expedition was to be the launch of a small remotely operated vehicle (ROV), which we planned to use to visit the landers we had just successfully deployed, for final servicing before the months of data collection ahead. Unfortuntately for us, the weather started to pick up yesterday afternoon, and the sea state after the final lander deployment was moving out of the safe operating window. After waiting for several hours for a break in the weather which never came, the call was finally made to head back into port. This afternoon, while packing up our equipment, we have been brainstorming options for getting another few days of ship time in the next weeks to try again. I am hopeful that a solution will be found soon; I'll let you know of further developments.
Until next time,
Beth Orcutt