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Cruise Report for NBP 95-07

Watch Standing

The hull of the RV/IB N. B. Palmer is fitted with a SeaBeam 2112 Multi-Beam and Side Scan Sonar ocean bathymetry mapping system. Since many different types of equipment are involved in processing and coordinating data collection, one of the primary purposes of the scientific crew is to monitor the operation of the underway data collection systems. All of this equipment must be kept in good working order to ensure meaningful data. This is the purpose of watch standing. Watch standing can be challenging on a ship where the pounding abuse of strong wind and waves toss and rock the ship. Periodic and often unexplained system malfunctions become common and require constant attention. The equipment that we monitored included Bathy 2000 and SimRad depth monitoring devices, the SeaBeam 2112 multi-beam data collection system with real-time data plotting, position and navigation equipment, weather monitoring equipment, gravity sensing equipment, and, at times, a master-slave gradiometer pair, magnetometer, and single- and multi-channel seismic streamers with gun control equipment.

To simplify monitoring the equipment, the RV/IB N. B. Palmer has a centrally located console or watch stander's station. The console has several computer and video monitors electronically linked to all critical areas of the ship. From this single location one can monitor data collection and plotting equipment, hoists and cranes distributed around the ship, as well as current weather and water conditions. Three pairs of watch standers were assigned to cover three eight hour shifts throughout each day. Watch standing consisted of writing down certain information in the watch standing log every five minutes and checking on the operation of equipment at regular intervals. The data, including the current time, latitude, longitude, bottom depth, gravity, heading, and speed, were logged every five minutes. In addition to these, any other events occurring during the cruise were also noted. Events, such as course adjustments necessary for iceberg avoidance, rapidly developing weather conditions, deployment and retrieval of gear, the success of sample collection efforts, equipment malfunctions and corrective actions, and file names of saved run-time data logs were all noted in the underway log. The result of this effort is a comprehensive and continuous written description of all of the events of the cruise in the order in which they occurred.

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