08/19/03 - Thunder & Troubleshooting
Last night we made it to the proposed MPA site and spent most of the night putting nets and trawls in the water. Activity was halted between 11:30 p.m. and 4 a.m. because of a storm with lightning, but when the sun rose the seas were beginning to calm down.
The
morning sub dive got off to a slow start. We have been having
problems with the digital camera attached to the front of the
sub. It has not been communicating with the laptop inside the
sub that is used to control the camera. We got everyone squared
away in the sub and the A-frame lifted off the deck of the ship,
but before it could be lowered in the water the scientist on board
figured out that there was a problem. So the sub was brought back
on deck. The technical folks spent about 30 minutes trying to
determine the cause of the problem, but were unable to fix it,
so the sub dive focused on collecting video footage rather than
still images.
The scientists reported seeing many different species of fish, including grouper, reef butterflyfish and big eyes.
In between sub dives we tried fishing with hook and line off the stern. No one caught anything that way. Then we put a Boston Whaler over the side and sent three folks out to fish. Unfortunately they did not catch anything before having to head back to the ship.
The sub went down for the afternoon dive around 4 p.m. It is returning to the area in the MPA to get more video footage and to try to collect some samples.
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