To be a sea-going oceanographer demands a lot of preparation, that goes without saying. But when you are staging a new expedition from a distant port with brand-new instrumentation that hasn’t been tested the challenges and hurdles quickly multiply. What follows is an example of the high levels of anxiety one might have to cope with when preparing for a cruise.
In the fall of 1978 Ants Leetmaa, a friend of mine from Graduate School days then working at NOAA, contacted me about the possibility of developing a technique for profiling ocean currents. He may have been aware of some profiling work I had done several years earlier at Bermuda, and thus had an idea of what might be possible. He was planning an expedition to study the response of the Somali Current off the Kenya coast to the switch in the monsoon winds from the NE to SW. His call came at a very opportune time for only days earlier we learned that a proposal we had submitted for another project had been rejected. And most important: Ants had the money on hand! So we, Don Dorson and I, went to work and designed the Pegasus system described on the Instrument page. But time was vey tight. Cruise departure was scheduled from Mahé in the Seychelles for April 1979. The pingers that were to be deployed on the ocean bottom had to be loaded on the ship, the NOAA ship Researcher in Miami in early January 1979 before she left the US. We quickly built these, but because we couldn’t trust air freight at Christmas time, a student and I became highway cowboys and drove them in a U-Haul truck down Rt. 95 to Miami.
Designing and building the Pegasus instrument required more work. We got all the pieces built and tested, but we didn’t have time to finish the assembly of the two Pegasus instruments before we had to leave for the Seychelles. So, I borrowed a campus truck and drove much of the Pegasus hardware to a freight forwarder at Logan airport in March to be air-shipped to the Seychelles. The remainder Don and I took as excess luggage (about 15 boxes of parts, electronics, batteries, and the syntactic foam flotation collars that were still curing!!!) when we flew to London. These were in the good old days, I can’t imagine being allowed this kind of excess luggage on a flight today! We checked the boxes for overnight storage at Heathrow. The next day we retrieved the boxes and boarded a British Airways flight to the Seychelles. We arrived in good time before the cruise so we could complete the assembly and trim weight of the floats before departure. That’s the good news. The bad news was that there was no sign of our shipment. Here we are south of the equator in the middle of the Indian Ocean! I immediately called Logan and URI seeking help to locate the shipment. If I remember right the shipment was painted in bright colors so it could easily be spotted in a warehouse. Fortunately, it was soon found at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. That came as quite a surprise, what was it doing there?! In any event, arrangements were made to get on the next departure. But that didn’t happen, it didn’t arrive as expected. Now time was tight, and we were getting very anxious. Ants was worried too and must have wondered if he had made a poor bet. He was chief scientist for the expedition, and the ship wasn’t going to wait for us. It was now or never. I burned a lot of phone $ pleading with shippers in Paris to please it on the next plane. Happily, it arrived on Maundy Thursday, the day before departure on Good Friday. We lucked out, Don and I went quickly to work to finish the assembly of the two Pegasus instruments and they were ready when we arrived at the first site Ants had picked for study. They worked fine and the project became quite a success, but the point here is that the distance between success and failure can be quite slim – so much can go wrong!