I haven't posted to the blog in a few weeks because work and travel has been eating up all my time. Now I am back in Seattle and feeling in control of my life again. When I travel for work it is GO GO GO. We work 7 days a week and at least 12 hours a day. By the time I get back to my room at night I just want to zone out and get some sleep. Enough excuses and on to what I have been doing.
The job was in Chesapeake Bay and was a major mobilization of equipment for a relatively short survey. We brought two trucks, an equipment trailer, and a 34' boat out from Seattle for just nine days of survey. I can't really say what we found or did not find or even tell you exactly where we were working. What I can say is the Navy was interested in examining the impact of their historical use of the waterways.
It was a very interesting job and utilized multiple types of sonar and our magnetometer array. We can pretty much find anything on the bottom that is not natural and is reasonably large. That said, this job was not about finding everything so much as just evaluating a large area and sampling a small percentage of the area (i.e. looking at the distribution of anomalies). The work was mentally and physically exhausting interspersed with occasional moments of boredom when everything was working. For the most part we had very nice weather - a little hot for my liking but good for boating. Occasionally, just occasionally, it felt like a vacation. A vacation from my cubical anyway.
At the end of the job I was tasked with returning a truck and our geophysics equipment trailer to Seattle. That worked out great because I was able to first drive up to New York and visit family. The drive back to Seattle was very long but a great experience. I will save that part of the trip for a separate post.
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| Nice weather to be working on a boat. |
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| My data acquisition and navigation station |
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| Rich is "flying" the towfish and collecting sidescan sonar data. |
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| The boat captain is piloting the vessel on pre-planed survey lines. |
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| The Ugly Duckling |
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