I am Cristian Graupe, a 1st year graduate student in Ocean Engineering at URI. I am a volunteer for this cruise, helping recover, refurbish, and deploy the acoustic landers. Today was yet another exciting day of transit aboard the R/V Endeavor, leaving us with plenty of time to take good care of our first recovered sub sea station and give it a nice, well deserved cleaning. Turns out, spending 6 months at the bottom of the ocean can take quite a toll on hardware. This, however, is nothing that a little elbow grease, and a little bit more actual grease, can’t solve.

This was actually my first time working hands-on with the landers, and it is absolutely an understatement to say that I am learning a lot about how long term operations are maintained at sea. As one might imagine, it is important to keep your hardware clean and rust free. I have spent most of the day on my hands and knees with a wire brush, scrubbing the rust off of bolts and nut, replacing batteries, and installing fresh storage that the lander will fill with new data over the next year. It may not sound exciting to some, but for those of us who like to get our hands dirty, today was about as exciting as it gets, and this was only the first of seven!

I am excited to see what kind of marine creatures the landers have been listening to over the past year. We got to see some pilot whales when we recovered it, so I am eager to see what other critters are around here.