Joe O’Sullivan: Mission Day 3: Thursday, March 9th, 2006
It’s the end of day 3 down in the Aquarius Habitat, and with the 4-6′ sea state surging overhead, we have to clear our ears (equalize) constantly.
What a fantastic opportunity it has been to come down to Key Largo, FL and do my first saturation dive in Aquarius.
We started off on Monday on shore with some great training and orientation to the habitat, as well as the diving techniques that we would use the rest of the week. Then on Tuesday, which was day one of the mission, we came down to the habitat and settled in. That evening we did some basic maintenance dives, cleaning exterior hull valves on the outside of the habitat, normal preventative maintenance so they continue to operate freely.
On day two (yesterday) four of us(Becker, Emborski, Spence and I) started off by adjusting an umbilical which carries HP air and communications to the Northeast waystation, which is about 900 feet from the habitat. We buoyed it and secured it to holddowns on the seabed, so that it will stay up off the reef, preventing damage to the coral and other reef organisms. This waystation, a small shelter identical to the Gazebo outside Aquarius, is important to future missions, enabling divers to fill thier SCUBA tanks without having to come all the way back to the habitat. Once the umbilical was trimmed and adjusted, John Emborski and I broke off and started to allign a 400 foot armored cable that had been dropped off by the topside support divers earlier in the morning. That cable carries power and data between the topside Aquarius Life Support Buoy and the NOAA Ocean Observing System module that will provide constant real time oceanographic data collected by instuments mounted on the seafloor. We were joined by Bob Whaley for that task and had the job finished by the end of the dive. In the afternoon the five of us trimmed out an umbilical to another waystation located in 95 FSW, 350 feet SE of Aquarius called the Kamper Station, and then it was back to Aquarius for more valve cleaning, this time on the BARFF (Big Air Remote Flask Farm), eight 33′ long “Amarillo” air flasks, which provide 80,000 cuft of HP air to the the habitat.
Today on day three, we swam out a number of excursion lines and tywrapped cave diving arrows to them, pointing towards the habitat. The arrows direct divers to the nearest source of air, so that they always know where they are in relation to the habitat or nearest underwater fill station. On some of the short jumper lines between the main excursion lines running to Aquarius, the arrows point to a way station that has a SCUBA fill station, such as the Kamper Station mentioned above. The afternoon dive consisted of preparing a small boat mooring site for grouting, drilling holes for rebar that will key the new grout to the existing mooring base previously grouted on the Navy Aquarius missions last December.
That about sums it up. Tomorrow, we have one last two hour dive, we have to be back at our storage depth six hours before we start decompression at 1600 hours, and sixteen and a half hours later we will surface on Saturday morning.
For now, I need to hit the rack and get some sleep.
O’Sullivan out!