Hey Rick!
Long time no talk. Man, that was a long adress for the story on the
Ferry. . .I would have given an account of the dives but the Transport
Safety Board slapped a 'communication ban' on the whole thing, and posted
signs on the worksite that any one who yapped to the press would be
charged. Sounds like these guys have taken a leaf from the airport
security
book! Anyhow, I can't tell you anymore than has been released by the TSB;
The 350'+ vessel 'Queen of the North' is sitting upright and intact in
1400
feet of water. She 'skied' in, with the result that the bottom mud/silt (
actually, glacial flour-type sediment) is up to her car-deck . . .about
30-35 feet above her keel. She must have produced an enormous dust-cloud
that followed her down slope and drifted over top of her - she's covered
with a light layer of fines.
Viz is good- about 30-40 feet, but lots of back-scatter in the HMI
lights, because of dense crystal critter life in the water column
(tentaphores,siphonophores,et.,etc.). Video recording has gone well in
last
couple of days and it looks as though the crew will be packing it in
tomorrow. The little DeepWorker2000's performed perfectly, as they most
often do - and so did the crew. Using a precision wireless tracking system
coupled with a Racal-designed position plotting system ('winfrog'), we
were
able to 'chain over' or interpolate the subs position to the
surface-mounted DGPS and get a precise GPS coordinate for every
significant
part of the wreck. This is all plotted on an electronic chart in the
tracking shack, and will allow us to return directly to any specific
location. A lot of this stuff was honed on cable tracking. We do many
cable
inspections every year and any damage or suspensions have to be position
recorded with sub-metre accuracy, so we can find 'em again. When we first
go on the job we transpose their 'as-laid' chart onto our electronic chart
and mark all their 'known' cable positions as red lines. We then dump the
sub in and fire up the Nuytco-designed cable-tracker, correlate it with
the acoustic transmitter and start following the cables - buried or laying
visible on the bottem- this automatically produces a green line on the
electronic chart/grid. Kinds fun to watch the engineers eyes bug out when
they see how far away the red lines are from the green lines!
This sure is an interestin' way to make a living!
Regards
Phil Nuytten
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