Well, today's wake-up call was not as bad as yesterday's, but as soon as I hopped in the shower and started washing-up, it happened again. Yes, the alarm went off again this morning -- 7:00 this time. I found myself dashing up to the hangar in nothing but jeans. I had a shirt and shoes in my hands. Of course everyone looked at me and laughed, but what was I supposed to do?
Aside
from my misfortune of being in the shower when the alarm sounded, the
day went fairly well. The alarm in the morning was due to a leak of the
lubrication oil in one of the shafts. Several hundred gallons spilled
out, apparently, and it took them a good deal of time (about two hours)
before they cleaned it up, and let us back downstairs.
In the morning very little happened, until Terry decided to head out
onto the ice. The boat was stopped, due to the GE (general emergency),
and there was no science to be done indoors, so it made sense to at least
check the ice out. We jumped into our mustangs, and headed out to the
helo deck to be lowered onto the ice. Before getting on, I had to strap
a heavy-duty belt on, which hitched to the lowering platform with a long
rope. They slowly used the crane to lower us down, and immediately Bill
was starting a core. We took a total of three cores, one for structure,
one for algae, and one for chemical analysis. Will
Ambrose and Pete Tilney both came onto the ice with us, and looked for
ice-algae. Out of the cores we dug, we found some real nice sediment samples,
and possibly a little algae, but not much. When we cruised around on the
ice looking for surface sediment, we found very little, so Terry and I
scraped up brown snow for melting.
We then loaded back on the ship, and the rest of the day was pretty much free. I had some lunch, went and played some guitar, and basically just hung out. I did a little work with the event log -- seeking out the last of the info it lacked from the last station. Lisa told me to enter in all of the latitude and longitude for every operation, and for every individual box-core. I did that, and then started on our second station that is going on right now. It started when us ice folks went out and did the sampling. The boat is trying to move to a spot that has good open water for all of the water people, so this station will probably last a long while. Hopefully tomorrow we will be within flying range of Barrow to get the parts that we need for the ROV, and hopefully there will be no alarm tomorrow morning.