How About Papayas and Sunsets?

For the judge’s record, I managed to stay awake long enough to see the end of the bathymetry survey this morning. Luckily the survey ended an hour and a half into my watch. Within the first hour, Trevor, my professor of knots, supervised my completion of a monkey’s fist.  After a half an hour of watching the swath of bathymetric paint appear on the screen at the rate of one inch per century, my eyes were scheming. I was relieved of my duty just in time.

Overnight, many brains on the ACO team got little sleep while working away on the J-box to reduce attenuation. By the time I returned to sleep at 0600, the J-box was ready to go back down to the bottom of the deep blue for a second try. When I awoke for breakfast – you can’t pass up breakfast on the KM or the spread of mangoes, raspberries, strawberries, and papaya may feel lonely – Jason and Medea were ready to go swimming as well.   At about 0800, the whole crew made a splash: Jason, Medea and the J-box.  I played paparazzi on the Jason crew during deployment until Dave caught me grabbing a candid of him and my cover was compromised.

While in the lab I heard over the PA system a message telling the ship’s company to disregard the following horn blasts because they are directed at a nearby fishing vessel. Apparently the fishermen were not responding to communication, running on autopilot and heading straight towards us. I came out to the quarterdeck in time to see the ship motoring away after coming within 100 m of us. Though the fishermen would have to travel the length of a football field to reach us, with Jason in the water the KM can’t move faster than a half a knot to get out of the way. Given the whole ocean, one would think this ship might be able to find fish elsewhere.

With more attention to spend on the observatory, I helped Jefrey and Cammy put bungee cords around the loose cable. These bungee cords need to be secure enough to not let the cables escape on the descent yet easily removable by Jason once on the seafloor. In the afternoon Cammy and I did the same for the cables wrapped around each side of the anchor. Out under the sun for an hour or two, we needed some inspiration to continue cutting bungees and fashioning handles for Jason to pull. James provided that inspiration when he hooked up the speakers to Alpha Charlie Delta Charlie, in acronym form: ACDC. Though the CD only provided 3 working tracks on repeat, it was enough to get us through the task.

At 1600, like clockwork, I marched up to the cockpit and took my seat behind the event logger for a period of waiting.  Just before I had arrived, Jason had inserted the connector back into the J-box and the cockpit was silent waiting for the verdict from Makaha. Makaha called back twenty minutes later with the same half good, half bad news: the power is on but the optical signal is not. Papers shuffled around desks, thoughts and questions volleyed across the blue-lit, crowded shipping container. Sentences started with “It’s gotta be…”, “Well, but then…”, “How about…” The satellite phone began to have poor reception so the decision makers moved to the bridge.  Yet the volleyball game continued in the van well into dinner passing suggestions back and forth, such as having Jason send an optical signal to Makaha and see how far it goes.  The solution that was arrived at after dinner was to test the cable thoroughly from the Makaha side and eliminate the issues that arise from solid ground. In the meantime we will be heading to Ka’ena Ridge to do some early search for some rocks. Jason‘s rock collection was looking a little lackluster last time I checked.

After dinner, I snuck out of the van “to use the head” just in time for the sunset. The sky was calm and the swell was not.  Where the two met, a yellow blinding ball gave way to shades of breakfast fruit: grapefruit slices and papaya halves then eventually came blueberry blackness.