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Mooring 5 schematic.[/caption]
Mooring 5 retrieval success! It’s been damn cool to watch; props to the deck crew and the wealth of experience that is CSIRO mooring pros Danny McLaughlan and Jamie Derrick that it’s been such a smooth operation.
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Ever felt like in spite of all your diligence, your headphones tie themselves in knots? Imagine if your headphones are 4km long![/caption]
Now you know what a mooring is and what’s on it, you’re probably wondering how we get it back on a boat when it’s currently lying end to end surface to the ocean floor. Well it starts with this super cool mooring grapnel.
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If conditions permit (the seas is calm) they can even throw it by hand. After that it’s matter of reeling in the cabling, detaching the instruments as they come onboard. They have a number of winches in different directions that allow them to not damage the instruments as they come on deck. The following diagrams from Danny McLaughlan help explain what I’m talking about.
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As you’ve probably noticed from the diagrams some of the mooring elements are really heavy so the deck crew are great at being careful with how to handle the mooring.
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Mooring retrieval is tricky business, science staff do a lot of watching. Image: Pamela Brodie.[/caption]
As the instruments come on deck one of the science staff will record their latitude/longitude and the instrument is cleaned and made ready for download.
Check out this time lapse video of one of the mooring retrievals to see what I’m talking about.
Since we’ve got time to spare. Chief scientist Ken Ridgway has added another 10 CDTs and two more transects with the Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler attached to hull of Southern Surveyor.
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In category: Southern_Surveyor