Dispatch 23: Last Mooring Recovery!

Luc Rainville

August 22, 2007

All four WHOI moorings have now been recovered. As for the other moorings, this recovery went really well. Everybody on deck worked as a perfect team. It is always a great relief when the instruments are on board, and you know that you have a year-long data set in hand. Sub-surface moorings are quite stressful this way: once you deploy them, you don't know if your instruments are working and collecting data until you recover them, a whole year later!

A quick measurements reveals very exciting data. With all the changes happening in the Arctic and to the global climate, long time series are invaluable. We still understand very little about the way the Arctic Ocean works, how water circulates around the different basins, how the water masses formed on the continental shelves reach the deep interior basin, how eddies are formed and how many populate the Beaufort Sea at any given time. The four WHOI moorings give us a fantastic tool to address these questions and several more!

The final mooring deployment is tomorrow!


Mooring D is back! For all four mooring recoveries, the sub-surface float came up right where we where expecting it and clear from the ice.		The Lebus winch is the workhorse of the mooring operations. It has been working flawlessly during this program.

The mooring recoveries and deployments are staged from the foredeck. The Lebus winch can be seen on the port side (left), and the wire goes over the side through the A-frame on the starboard side (off the picture, to the right).		Bosun Bob Taylor and Kris Newhall are using a chain hook to transfer the load and disconnect the different instruments as we are pulling the mooring on board.

Kris Newhall and Rick Krishfield, overseeing the mooring operations.		Chief Officer Stéphane Legault and Jim Dunn are making sure that everything in in order near the winch.
		Photos by Luc Rainville

Last updated: October 7, 2019