Bon Voyage! Today at 11:00am the Oceana Latitude shipped off to sea.
The Latitude and Oceana crew held a strategy meeting to discuss the next seven days and what they will have in store. Pacific Science Director, Dr. Jeff Short explained his science experiment and that the basic approach for evaluating the subsurface oil plumes will be the deployment of an array of moorings with sensor strips every 100 m.
Moorings will be deployed in three main areas: 12 within 5 km of the wellhead, 12 in a rectangular array extending up to 90 km to the northeast of the wellhead, and 12 in another rectangular array extending up to 90 km southwest of the wellhead.
With everyone in agreement, it was time to go. Due to the drastically shallow shore line, the Mississippi Port Authorities require a local captain come aboard to navigate boats through the shallows, until they are offshore. An additional treat was when pelicans and other various marine birds decided to escort us out to sea.
Once out at sea the Oceana team continued to assemble gear for the next day’s first mooring drop. The travel duration to the first drop site will be 8-10 hours and seas are predicted to be at 5-7 feet. Stay tuned