Stick Operational Again

All systems are working perfectly, and we're about to head back home.

 Jim

Brain unplugged

We (Mike Jankulak, Lew Gramer, Nancy Ash) just unplugged the brain from the stick and will try to reinstall this afternoon.

We also scrubbed down all the chains, lines and instruments.  The station looks pretty good.  Water extremely clear, weather good, a very nice day to be in the field.

Jim

CMRC3 offline

Transmissions from CMRC3 ended abruptly last Sunday evening at 10pm EDT (Monday at 200 hours UTC). This was approximately four and a half days after our last visit (Wednesday morning) during the recent maintenance trip.

The most likely suspect is a failure of the transmitter or its cables and antennae. CMRC3 transmissions, including datalogger and transmitter diagnostics, were entirely normal up until the time of failure. The final transmission had 53 of 75 reported fields present and the rest was ascii garbage, but instrument counts and diagnostics indicate that the station was operating normally during that last hour before transmitting.

Therefore there's reason to hope that the station continues to operate silently and is recording its data to the station's memory module. The Shallow-CTD was of course offline but it, too, records its data to flash memory and we expect to retrieve those data in the next trip.

The next maintenance trip will involve troubleshooting the transmitter problem and running a new cable for the Shallow CTD.

-- Mike Jankulak

Maintenance Update

Mike Jankulak:

Tuesday, October 3: boat-support for dive work; attempted to contact brain via radio units but couldn't; climbed stick, installed rungs and removed brain to take it back to land; downloaded memory module contents; replaced and rewired brain's radio unit; wrote a new CMRC3 program to include bic re-address logic and tested it thoroughly; pulled a new cable for shallow BIC and rewired its plug at top; swapped out surface bic; reinstalled brain (but GPS cable is knocked loose); confirmed that station was NOT transmitting

Wednesday: fixed GPS cable in brain; attempted to fix broken shallow-ctd plug but doesn't work; tidied/sealed station and removed rungs (twice!).

Jim Hendee:

The station lines and chains were cleaned, the shallow CTD swapped out, and all three BICs swapped out.  Station should undergo some reorganization of the cables and more intensive cleaning.

Cleaning

Team of Jules Craynock and Jim Hendee cleaned the station lines and equipment of biofouling. No extensive bleaching, but some isolated spots on Siderastrea and a species of brain coral (pictures were taken). At nearby North Norman's Patch Reef, there was some bleaching on isolated sections of a not-so-healthy thicket of Acroporis cervicornis (many dead areas from apparently last year).

Jim

Cleaning

Jules Craynock and Nancy Ash cleaned station June 29th. Jules reports some moderate bleaching of brain corals.

Jim

May maintenance

Monthly cleaning was done with the ground-truthing CT and was checked for any wear and tear, which was in really good conditions. The only exception was for the surface rust on the upper links of the chain where it meets the stainless steel shackles. In all upper links of the chain, zincs were installed. As well most of all the shackles were moused with wire, which replaced the older zip ties that were in.

Besides the maintenance, the deep water CTD sensor was exchange with a "new" CTD sensor with an improved capillary tube for the pressure sensor. The replacement was done between 0830-0930. The replaced CTD sensor was brought back to the lab.

Hector Casanova