NFSI Community Update - September 2021
Dear Friends,
The first five BOBS were released by Customs Canada on September 15, more than 2 weeks after they arrived. They were delivered to us on September 20, 3 weeks after arriving. Below are a couple of photos of Katie handling the Aquarius BOBS. You can see that our only storage room with big enough doors to bring the instruments in was completely filled with the 5 instruments from batch 1. Knowing that we badly need space to store the 120 instruments we will have, Graeme, Katie, and I went to visit COVE (Centre for Ocean Ventures and Entrepreneurship, https://coveocean.com). The COVE is right on the water on the Dartmouth side, with beautiful views of Halifax. There is a lot of outside space so it’s an optimal place to store our instruments, for which we will need at least 3 full-size containers. To bring instruments in the NFSI lab we had to put them on a smaller pallet, so we quickly purchased a 1 ton aluminum gantry crane and needed accessories to be able to lift the BOBS. After receiving the first batch, we had an online training session with Guralp that was attended by 3 Ocean Frontier Institute support techs from outside our core NFSI group, for whom our plan is to provide flexible support for field operations. We also accepted the second batch of 7 instruments, which were shipped and are expected to arrive on October 11. Now we are scrambling to learn how to operate the instruments with hopes to deploy them in the deeper sections of the Laurentian Slope at the end of October and early November. This plan assumes that everything goes smoothly, so we will need a lot of luck to get trained and make this happen.
Best,
Mladen
