The toll at New Harbor

It is a common adage among oceanographers that any instrument placed in the water should be considered lost until it has been successfully recovered and the data downloaded. I suppose, in a sense, my camera constitutes a successful deployment, as it was indeed recovered, and indeed functioned slightly after recovery, going so far as to take pictures at some points, though not of any useful quality. I am now in the market for a new camera.

Otherwise, today was mainly a day for packing the ton of gear we brought. I got the chance to inventory my incredibly overpacked food supplies; as food czar I only overestimated our food consumption by about 150 pounds (50%), though some of that overage can be blamed on various people's strange requests for huge quantities of cabin bread, powdered milk and canned fruit. We even had too many snacks and chocolate despite the valiant efforts of many.

As has been previously reported, we were trying out a new dive site today. Stacy and I got to slither through the small but perfectly sized hotsy hole and determine if this was in fact the site that Paul Dayton had left 25 years before. I dropped in first; being the larger, if I can't make it through the hole the dive has to be canceled. Stacy made it easily, and we headed down into the darkness. I'd planned to level off at 60 or 70 feet and look around for Paul's floating settlement arrays, and Stacy and I both circled for a while, eyeing light smudges and dark spots below us before finally giving up hope and finishing the descent. One hundred and ten feet; too shallow! Normally 110' would be deeper than I'd like, but the site we were trying for was at 130', so we were once more out of luck. It was still a beautiful dive, however, with lots of rocks covered with sponges and crinoids making it an excellent last New Harbor dive.

Given the mis-location of the dive hole, the afternoon dive team decided to give it a miss, and we dug more furiously into packing and cleaning. By the early evening all of our gear had been packed and placed in various locations, then partially unpacked and moved as items were discovered to have been frozen that were not supposed to, or vice versa. We finally reached the point where we decided to leave well enough alone and not open any more boxes. Since many still had boundless stores of energy, a series of expeditions set out in various directions, Jen heading south, Craig north, Stacy and Jonna west, and Jim went east. I think we really needed a few moments to decompress after two weeks of close living and stinky socks!

Finally, since many people have described our daily adventures, and we're now finishing up our New Harbor experience, I thought I'd summarize our accomplishments, annoyances and debacles to date.

• Accomplishments: The list of accomplishments is rendered particularly impressive by the fact that all of this was accomplished in the face of multiple illnesses and equipment failures that repeatedly incapacitated one or more party members of major pieces of equipment. In essence, we got everything done we needed to, and quite a few optional details as well.
  1. No problems on any dives.
  2. Everyone is healthy, if recovering from colds and/or sore.
  3. All cores recovered from Bernacchi.
  4. All cores recovered from Explorer's Cove.
  5. Week long S4 deployment, with CTD cast.
  6. Video and stills taken from all sites.
  7. We had wireless, solar-powered, broadband ethernet by the end of the trip!
• Debacles: I define a debacle as any event that eliminated one of our major pieces of equipment or cost us a significant portion of a day.
  1. Gear not delivered, requiring multiple helo flights over two days of to transport.
  2. My camera flooded.
  3. Jim sick.
  4. Skidoo killed and returned.
• Annoyances: This is the list of things that had a fairly major impact, for the worse, on our work.
  1. 6 kw generator started leaking diesel badly.
  2. Hotsy generator died every two hours, requiring constant supervision.
  3. Missed holes.
  4. Jiffy Drill power head broken off.
• Trivia: These constitute some of the minor day-to-day things that just seemed to crop up with great regularity. They usually just resulted in a fifteen minute run back to the dive locker or a dive rendered somewhat less productive.
  1. Chipper bars, lost 1, recovered 2 (1 from last year!)
  2. Someone dropped her tanks into the dive hole.
  3. Tank O-ring failed, rendering one tank unusable.
  4. Miscellaneous buckles broke repeatedly.
  5. Miscellaneous lights failed to turn on.
  6. Various two-cycle engines (Jiffy Drill, Chainsaw, Skidoo) all failed to start or were infuriatingly recalcitrant numerous times.