Wow, It's Already Wednesday

This week, this summer session has seemed to go by fairly quickly. I have discovered that I have already finished all the non-final tests for my class, which is nice. I also feel as though I'm pretty well back on track for that course, again nice. Today I might even get ahead a little.

But all of that is boring compared with work.

Last time I worked it was for 7.5 hours doing field testing of the little toy sub that we built. Much much fun. We were driving around the lake having it take sonar images of whatever we could find. Overall the day was a large success, until we hit the last run for the day.

We had been having good success of taking sonar of fish and the boat and such, so with just enough charge we decided to drive across the path of the little bot so it could get the boat in motion, instead of just flying by a stationary boat. Well we sent the little sucker on its way then gunned the boat to get in front of it and swerved about in the sub's path, thus ensuring some wild sonar images. Well we waited to here the little "I'm over here" alarm the sub gives after it surfaces. We waited and waited-no alarm.

This is about the time the panic started to set in, the forward look sonar device the sub was carrying is worth about $50,000. Naturally not something that would be good to lose. Well after spending a few minutes trying to figure out what happen and convince ourselves that we had not in fact run the darn thing over we pulled out the hydrophone and triangulated the position down to about 2 meters-This took an hour or two. After this we waited for the scuba diver to arrive (one of the reasons I would like to get scuba certified) and after testing the water and depth and other such things we dropped him basically on top of where the sub was. He was under for maybe 10 minutes when he came back up holding our $50,000+ toy.

We were well pleased to find that there wasn't a scratch on it. Apparently the prop wash was enough to throw the thing about a third of it's own length into the sticky mud at the bottom, where it engaged it's "I'm too deep under water" routine which consists of turning off the motor and waiting to float to the surface. The mud disagreed with this plan and instead held the little sub on the bottom until it's battery died and then we found it.

That was an excited day at the lake.

Today I spent outfitting another sub to pull a hydrophone along behind it so that we can listen in on fish conversations and what not. The plan with the next run is to try to get two of our subs working together.