NORTH ATLANTIC
7:00 a.m. — We are greeted with beautiful blue sunny skies and calm seas this morning, and hopes are high. Over a year of work comes down to this day. The plan is to do a tethered dive today during which we will create the majority of our show. Then, we will do an untethered dive tomorrow to perform additional exploration that can be edited in. The end result will be a full back-up show that we can feed off to our playout facility in Georgia to run in case of problems on Sunday.
10:00 a.m. — After taking care of some e-mail business, the crew helps me to shoot interviews with our scientists and historians for Discovery.com. It is really interesting to hear the passion these guys have for this subject and how they got involved with it (most by seeing Titanic movies or reading Titanic books as kids).
1:40 p.m. — After some delays, the launch of Mir 1 goes perfectly. Many of the people on board are new and have not witnessed a launch of the Mir sub before, watching as it is lifted into the ocean from a massive crane on the Keldysh. It is fun to see the excitement on their faces during the event.
7:00 p.m. — As dinnertime arrives, Mir 2 still has not launched because of technical issues in the sub. There is one more delay to reconfigure the monitor wall inside the sub.
8:00 p.m. — It appears that we are ready to go when word comes that one of the critical tape decks inside the Mir has failed. By the time the deck gets fixed a problem has arisen with the sub itself, and work begins to fix that issue. We have also now learned that the ship has drifted 30 minutes from the drop zone and that bad weather is on its way in.
10:00 p.m. — After a great deal of discussion it is decided to scrub the launch. There is too much danger to the crew to go ahead in rough seas. The RHIBs — our rigid hull inflatable boats — would have to stay in the water for the duration of the mission and hold position with the fiber from the sub attached. An even greater danger is to the diver who has to get in the water to hook up the fiber and ready the ROVs for the dive. Diving at night in 10-foot seas around a submersible is extremely dangerous, so this is the right decision. The crew heads out to try and get some sleep.
On a difficult day, I am reminded how many people have made enormous sacrifices for this program, among them Andrew Wight, the executive producer from Earthship Productions, who has spent most of the last year away from his home in Australia; Ronnie Allum, Jim Cameron's technical genius, who has also been away from his home in Australia in addition to his wife and two small children for most of the last year; and countless others.
Bob Sitrick is vice president of live production for Discovery.
More Leg 2 Expedition Logs: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7 | Day 8 |
Also read the entries from Leg 1 of the expedition. |
