Neon Green Rotini

The day started on the roof of the Marine Sciences Building with Jeffrey, Nicholas, Craig and 200 meters of permed neon green cable. Our intention was to lay the coil of cable out and let the spins unravel themselves in the air off the side of the building. We began by feeding the cable off the roof to Jeffrey below where he strung it out along the grass and around trees.  It is here that the cable changed what had been a concise plan into a three-hour wrestling match. The cable decided against unraveling itself and instead asked us to do it. Using the technique Nicholas taught me, I cranked my arms around as if pedaling a bicycle with my hands to propagate the twists in the cable to the end. After the three of us forced as many twists as possible to the end, we heaved the cable back up the side of the building to flake it out on the roof.  At this point it looked less like rotini and more like spaghetti so we felt nearer to the end. In order to wind it on the spool, the cable had to be sent back down the building to be heaved up once more for tension.  Though I got myself tangled in a bit of spaghetti on the way back up, the spool was tight and uniformly spun by noon.

In the afternoon down at the ship we were presented with the same challenge at half the magnitude. A 100 m neon green cable needed to be untwisted and coiled around the anchor of the mooring.  Faced with an unfriendly cement surface on which to lay out the somewhat delicate cable and an unwillingness to wrestle for another three hours, Dave and Nicholas got creative. They devised a plan in which we rolled out the cable along the surface of the water holding each water-sensitive end above the water and slowly pulled it back around the anchor’s spool.  The twists in the cable willing sent themselves to the end this time without the friction resistance caused by contact with the ground.  Jeffrey, holding the end of the cable, easily let the turns off the end and the whole operation took under and hour.

At the end of the day, I worked for a while with one of the engineers, Kimball, to secure parts of the observatory with twine and wrap protective plastic around connecting cables.  Kimball explained to me some of the ways in which the observatory is built to accommodate installation by Jason. The shackles, for instance, are hard to unscrew for a ROV so they have extensions with handles that Jason’s digits can grasp.  The instruments that for the last couple of days have just been weights in boxes needing to be moved from flatbed to basket to ship storage are now starting to arrange themselves in my head as parts of a bigger whole – the observatory.