Dispatch 16: : Mooring A deployed, TOP6 recovered
Ashley Arroyo (Yale University)
September 14, 2024
20:10 UTC, 75:20°N `150.09°W
Conditions:
- Foggy
- 0% sea ice cover
- -1.7°C
- Winds 13.9 knots easterly
- Sunrise: 14-Sep-2024 08:53:11 -06
- Sunset: 14-Sep-2024 23:01:06 -06
- Day length: 14h 7mn 54s
This morning began with operations on the forward deck for the deployment of Mooring A. The deployment was almost identical to that of Mooring B, with each of its parts winched off the deck in the reverse order as they were recovered: its anchor, acoustic releases and bottom pressure recorder, followed by its profilers (which record temperature, salinity, and velocity), other sensors, and finally, its yellow flotation sphere. Once Mooring A was deployed and the deck was secured, the Louis began to steam north to of an old TOP (TOP 6) that was waiting to be recovered, which happened to be drifting right along our transit to station CB-7. The buoy team used its hourly GPS data to locate its position, and we were able to quickly spot the yellow surface buoy as the Louis approached the location. From that point, the recovery was seamless. Deckhand Jerome Sibley was lowered in the man-basket to clip in the TOP, and then it was carefully lifted aboard using the winch. The science crew was pleased to find that the TOP was recovered fully in-tact, despite it having traveled over the shallow eastern shelf of the Canada Basin. This means the buoy can be refurbished (without the addition of many new parts) and re-deployed in the Arctic Ocean in the future. TOP6 had an incredible two-year long journey in the Arctic Ocean- its vertical profiler traveled over 1 million meters during its lifetime!\
After the TOP recovery, the Louis arrived at station CB-7 after supper, where the daytime watch-standers completed CTD/bongo casts and subsequent water sampling. We are now steaming southwest to our next station, CB-5.
