This poor guy had just had several implants and tracking devices surgically removed and was still sleeping off the ketamine. But he was still fun to see anyway:
So after visiting with the seal, I went back to the dive hut to carry on with another SCINI dive. Unfortunately, unlike the first two dives, this dive met with failure! First, one of the two active camera lights failed, and then the imagery received from the robot was far too dark. When we pulled the robot back out of the water, we noticed smoke inside the camera "bottle" and immediately shut off power. We took the camera bottle back to the lab and eventually determined there was a short circuit in the camera lighting circuitry due to salt water intrusion:
We took this opportunity of being back in the lab to fix several other nagging problems.
In the mean time, we started preparing a new dive site at Cape Armitage. This site is about a 15 minute drive across the sea ice from McMurdo Station, and is in sight of the New Zealand base. We are using a device to melt a hole through the ice called a "Hotsy". We had tried several attempts with a truck-mounted hydraulic drill but were not able to reach water by the time the 24 foot limit of the drill was reached. Thus we resorted to melting our way through. Here Francois and I are refueling the generator and melting machine:
This collection of machines pumps hot propylene glycol through a metal coil which is lowered down a hole. This heats the surrounding water, which expands the hole in the ice.
While we were making a hole at a new site, two of us were SCUBA diving in a dive hut in front of the station. The dive hut has a heater which keeps the inside fairly warm. We had also rigged a fan and a plastic tube to blow warm air on the surface of the ice hole to prevent it from re-freezing:
We have been promised an actuall day off tomorrow (Sunday), but it only starts after our 4:30AM trip to refuel the generator and Hotsy.
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