ITP 21 Recovery Operations

The following year, a few weeks later in the season, ITP 21 was in a convenient location along the cruise track of the JOIS 2009 cruise of the CCGS Louis S. St. Laurent so that an attempt could be made to locate and recover the buoy as it was clear that the profiler was no longer climbing the wire.  The problem was that the latest location broadcast from the system was at least 15-16 hours old and the system could have drifted 10s of miles in the meantime.  In the southern Beaufort Gyre and close to the annual minimum, the sea ice in the area was broken up into smaller sized floes and relatively thin looking.  An hour was spent on the first reconnaissance searching in one direction, and then a half an hour into the second flight the package was spotted.

We landed on the floe (which was too small to recover from) and attached a hoisting strap just below the buoy for assisting a ship board recovery.  Back on the ship, the Captain steered the vessel into the floe and directly over the buoy.  In the wash astern, ITP 21 buoy popped up with a red stripe where the multi-ton icebreaker marked it.  Another hour and a half were spent attaching to the sling on the buoy, hauling it and the cable onboard, and retrieving the profiler on the bottom wire bumper.  The profiler was in excellent shape, without any significant visible fouling, but one of the two wire-tension springs had parted in the middle.