Falkland Islands Shifts

So after the holidays I shifted over to the M/V Asima for one rotation.  She was operating in the Falkland Islands as well so it wasn't much different but a change of food and crew made it interesting and I did get to meet a bunch of new folks. Now I'm back aboard the M/V Nadia and still in the Falklands... The Southern Ocean gets pretty tedious after 6 months let me tell you I'm just a little ready for some tropical sun.  We are supposed to be transiting the ship back north soon, so another crossing of the equator is in order... In the mean while I'll put in some images of our boat... 

so this kind of reminds me of the old Sid and Marty Croft series from the 70s "Sigmund the Sea Monster"... you just need to add some big googly eyes... Kelp is a real issue down here in the southern ocean... we typically pick up 2-5 tons per streamer.

Here are our streamers being deployed... these things hang out the back of the boat for 5 kilometers so you can imagine when I start talking about a tangle or a spaghetti monster... that it can be quite ugly...

 A view of the Streamer Deck... Notice the horizon

 Here is the Nadia with the full towed array deployed and collecting data.  When deployed these boats are the largest moving objects on the planet.

 This is looking into the streamer deck forward from the back... This is where we spend most of our "outdoor" time... deploying and recovering streamers.

 Here are the tailbouys for our streamers... These provide navigational data for the tail of the streamer cable so that we always know where the cables are in relation to one another. These little buggers look like little yellow submarines... in fact I sing that alot when working with them...

 Here is the birds eye view from the top forward mast looking aft...

 Again the full spread deployed we have the ability to pull 12 streamers up to 10km each...

 These are "birds" like little diving wings... these control the depth of the streamers and allow us to keep them vertically separated...

 These are the tow points looking into the giant winch drums on the streamer deck.  If you can imagine giant levelwind open fishing reels... here they are... look out for the Kraken...

 This is the tailbouy section of the gun deck... this is really close to the water and always floods in rough weather...

 The gun deck looking aft... where the seismic sources are (bolt guns)... this area like I said before floods quite regularly...

 The gun deck looking forward...

 The instrument room looking at Navigation on the right and Observers on the left.

The instrument room from the far end... my workspace is behind the stairs on the left.