Tuesday, November 16, 2004 Dave Conlin studied anthropology and archeology as an undergraduate at Reed College in Portland Oregon and continued his graduate studies in archeology at Oxford University in England and at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.  He was the field director for the recovery of the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley in 2000, the Ellis Island Ferry in 2002 and the Lake Mead B-29 in 2002 and 2003.

Brain Salad Surgery


Jenni Burbank tends the VideoRay for Tuesday's operation. NPS photo by Brett Seymour.

Today dawned a little clearer and less windy than yesterday and we all headed to the park with a mixture of hope and a lingering queasy feeling in the bottom of our stomachs. The VideoRay ROV had spent the night splayed out in pieces on one of our Pelican shipping cases like a Transformer toy that had been through a blender. After dismantling our little flooded robot yesterday and borrowing a dome port from the Navy (thanks again Chief Petty Officer Keller and Petty Officer Ohalek from the Regional Dive Locker, Pearl Harbor), we decided to leave the sub open overnight to dry some more. Our first task was to put the sub back together like it had been before with our spare motherboard and the new dome.  It took a little figuring but we managed to connect all the right wires to all the right places on the board and then get the sub ready for diving operations. Marcus Kolb at VideoRay had been amazingly quick off the mark and our replacement dome ports and spare ROV were winging their way across the Pacific as we set up. Even so, if we couldn't get things operational on our own, we'd be down until 4 or 4:30 in the afternoon at the earliest. Fortunately, our ROV worked with its new brain and we were geared up and ready to go.
 

The VideoRay carries the YSI in the Flag Secretary's Stateroom. NPS photo by Brett Seymour.

The ROV operation has evolved into an extremely complex series of tasks using complicated systems and sub-systems to get us what we want and where we want to get it. Brett Seymour needs the Hydroflex lights to shine through the porthole and let us see what's in the cabin and allow us to document the data collection process.  We need hard-wired communications between the divers and the topside part of the team. We have the VideoRay ROV, a GIS database of the different deck levels and the YSI environmental sonde collection and calibration software. Brett has digital, still and video cameras along with their lights and associated parts and all of this is going on both topside and underwater.

The VideoRay investigates a desk in the Marine Division Office collecting data with the YSI environmental sonde. NPS photo by Brett Seymour.

Once we got everyone in the water with what they needed to operate (Brett on camera, John Wehrle on light, Jenni Burbank on tether management for the ROV, Art Ireland tending cables from the dock), we headed aft to revisit some of the second deck cabins we had been in last year. Our goal was to shake out the ROV and to get some longitudinal data on the water chemistry inside the wreck. I was the ROV pilot, a position where if you do your job well you might get a pat on the back but if you do your job badly, you've got a $15,000 snag somewhere deep in the bowels of a ship we won't enter. We started in the Marine Division office, and then moved to the Flag Secretary's stateroom. Everything went well until I snagged the ROV tether between the top of a partly opened door and a bulkhead in the Flag Secretary's stateroom.  As Jenni alternately pushed and pulled lightly on the tether from outside, I jiggled back and forth with the ROV and used my best body English to get the tether out of the snag. After a few tense moments, we finally got free.  Does a resurrected ROV get nine lives or just one? Let's hope the former. As we closed down operations for the day, our new dome ports and spare ROV showed up in Hawaii as promised. VideoRay and UPS -- what a team!

Dave Conlin (r.) flies the VideoRay on the second deck while Matt Russell monitors the data and tracks the progress with the GIS. Photo by Kelly Gleason.