First Day at French Frigate Shoals

Danny getting ready to deploy an anchor

Our first day at French Frigate Shoals is drawing to a close with only a few more hours of data entry to go. I spent the morning as a Safety Diver aboard the Oceanography boat, which was interesting but thankfully uneventful. I didn't actually get in the water because in NOAA's grand wisdom they have dictated that Safety Divers are required to sit on the surface during a working dive and get into the water only if something goes wrong. If we were to follow these rules exactly, we would only know that something went wrong when the divers failed to surface 30-45 minutes later - personally I think this would be a tad too late - and thankfully so does the rest of our division. So we put 2 working divers in the water along with an observer who can alert the surface if there is trouble and then we will get in the water to help.

But as I said, operations went smoothly and I kept perfectly dry and warm. It was impressive to watch however, as a 250 pound anchor was deployed and a 1200 pound anchor was recovered, all from a 20 foot small boat. The anchors were dropped and lifted using lift bags, which are essentially large, heavy duty balloons that are slowly filled with air from SCUBA cylinders as you raise the object off of the bottom. It sounds easier than it actually is because as you are lifting the anchor, you have to control the amount of air in the bag so that it doesn't rise too quickly. Plus as you go higher in the water column, the air in the bag is expanding and causing the bag to rise faster while you are trying to stay out of the way of the bag and the weight.

Lift bag and diver at the surface carrying a 1200 pound weight

Anchor being craned back onto the ship

Once the weight was safely back alongside the small boat, we towed it back to the ship where it was craned out of the water and we went back to business as usual. I spent the rest of the afternoon being a dive buddy for the fish team because one of their members is sick, so again it was uneventful but fun to see some different sites.

That's about all for now. I'm off to prep cameras for tomorrow.

Take care and have a good night,

Cristi