“I’m going to work on deck, I’m going to move forward. I am one day going to be captain of a vessel. It might be twenty years down the road, but no one’s going to stop me from doing this.” Elysia is the ordinary seaman (O/S) onboard R/V Sally Ride, which is perhaps an unexpected job for someone who grew up in the … Read More
Overnight Ops: CTD Yo-Yos
There’s a lot of different groups of Scripps scientists onboard R/V Sally Ride this week, all vying to get their science objectives done. One of the groups has been here before. Back in December, grad student Maddie Hamann was chief scientist of a three day cruise recovering moorings and doing CTD surveys to study internal tides around the La Jolla … Read More
Technicians At Sea: My Story
“Not all those who wander are lost.” – J.R.R. Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring If I’m going to write a series of blogs about technicians at sea onboard R/V Sally Ride, I may as well start with myself. If you’ve read the brief intro in the About the Author section on this page, you’ll know that I have always been … Read More
Overnight Ops: Mapping a Fault
For three nights on this research cruise aboard R/V Sally Ride, John DeSanto, a graduate student in Dr. David Sandwell’s lab at Scripps, used the ship’s multibeam to map the seafloor. His target was an area of the San Diego Trough fault, which runs offshore from the Mexican border to Catalina Island. The multibeam, as you may remember from a previous post, … Read More
ROV Trident
For the next week, Scripps’ remotely-operated vehicle (ROV) will be aboard Sally Ride. Named Trident after UC San Diego’s mascot, it’s rated to a depth of 2,000 meters. Technicians from SIO plan to deploy the ROV each day using a small crane bolted to the port side of the ship. The control center is in a converted shipping container also bolted to … Read More
Crew Introductions: Second Engineer
“Not many people can say they love their job, that they like to work. I can.” Second engineer Sue Swader has been on the water since infancy, and loves it. Her grandparents have a sailboat and she spent summers sailing with her family to the Channel Islands, including Catalina and Santa Cruz. When she’s not working on the water, she’s playing on it – … Read More
Multi-Corer Trials
As part of this science verification cruise, groups from Scripps, WHOI, Oregon State, Sacramento State, URI, CSU Bakersfield, and the USGS are testing out various coring devices using R/V Sally Ride. This requires a very specific setup on the fantail, with two small cranes bolted down for fine-tune positioning of the heavy coring equipment. Also on deck are two container vans, one … Read More
Crew Introductions: Second Mate
“This is the job I wanted…it’s just a great environment, great people, involved in interesting work that I feel is contributing to the bettering of the world. I feel like I’m part of something big here.” R/V Sally Ride’s Second Mate Randy Christian came to the maritime industry via a circuitous route. One day while taking classes at the Evergreen State … Read More
Logging Core Samples
The core samples taken so far onboard R/V Sally Ride have utilized either a 20 or 30 foot long cylinder with PVC pipe inside. Ideally, the entirety of the pipe is filled, but the amount of sediment actually recovered can vary. For example, if a layer underneath the surface of the seafloor is harder clay, the pipe may get stopped short. … Read More
Photos from the Multi-Corer
One of the many instruments onboard the multi-corer frame is a 24-megapixel camera that take flash photographs every 10 seconds. The camera belongs to the NSF-funded MISO (Multidisciplinary Instrumentation in Support of Oceanography) facility at WHOI, and is designed to visually document the area of the seafloor where core samples are taken. An added bonus of taking pictures during the descent and ascent through … Read More