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August 23, 2016

Patience and changing plans

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Proa Neptune

 

You learn a lot about patience when working on research vessels. There are many things which are beyond your control; the weather and currents being the most obvious ones. At any time you need to be able to adjust your plans and work under the prevailing conditions. Things may also break down and you need to re-plan and see if there is some other work that could be done instead. Often the connections to the outside world are also poor when offshore and you are only able to communicate with your colleagues in office and family randomly, not necessarily when you need to. A lot of patience is also needed when you try to locate certain features at the sea bottom, which may or may not be there, with the ROV, it normally means hours and hours of sitting in front of the screen waiting for something to pop-up.

Today we continued the search for pockmarks in the morning and then continued to cover rest of the Gasfonteinen in the afternoon. While doing ROVs the ship’s pole, needed for tracking the ROV, broke. So, we had to stop the ROV operations and wait to have the pole fixed. This unexpected occurrence forced us to come up with a Plan B, which in this case meant covering the area north and west from the presumed pockmark site by taking grabs. Luckily, this time the interruption took only couple of hours and we were soon back on to our Plan A.