7:00 a.m. — The crew awakens to a thick fog engulfing the
Keldysh. Slow rollers nudge the ship from port to starboard gently and predictably. Satellite communications for the production remain inoperative, so there is no phone or email aboard. The handheld satellite phone is our only connection with home. The engineers work to install a gyroscopic compass that will help the satellite hold its lock.
8:00 a.m. — At the morning Mir meeting the discussion centers on whether to dive or not to dive. The subs are mostly ready, but members of both the sub crew and the production crew have been working through the night making preparations.
11:00 a.m. — Anatoly Sagalevitch and Jim Cameron decide to delay today's dive. The Mir engineers and our technical crew could use another day to prepare. The plan now is to make full preparations for an early dive Tuesday that will give the team more time on the wreck, then quickly reset for another early dive Wednesday.
The team will use the extra afternoon to rehearse boat operations. The plan calls for Prime RHIB to receive the end of the fiber-optic cable from Mir 2 before it begins its descent. The Keldysh crew has deployed radio transponders on the ocean floor so that the Mir subs can navigate their way to the wreck.
The descent of those transponders also allowed the engineers to calculate the predicted drift during descent: about 300 meters to the southeast. With the Mir linked to the RHIB by fiber-optic cable, Dave Cameron, Prime RHIB's driver, must hold the boat at specific coordinates to maintain the cable angle and send the microwave signal back to the ship.
All of this is technology that has never before been attempted. Dr. Sagalevitch recommends that the boat operations drill take place at 5 p.m., when the fog is more likely to lift. Cameron suggests that a rehearsal in fog may be a good idea, since those conditions may likely occur during tomorrow's 12-hour dive.
Noon — Suddenly, a strong wind comes up from the southeast and the seas begin to build. The Keldysh is drifting now in the wind and current to conserve fuel. Anchoring is not possible in 2 1/2 miles of water and the Keldysh is not equipped with geostationary technology. It's up to the captain and crew to motor us back to the wreck site for tomorrow's dive.
2:00 p.m. — Our first technical setback: The satellite engineers report that their system is inoperable, possibly for the duration of this first leg of the expedition. That means no Internet and no telephones. Neither are mission critical on this phase, when no live broadcasts are essential, but if similar circumstances were to occur on the second leg of the expedition, we would be forced to abort the mission and start the two-day journey back to St. John's.
8:00 p.m. — The engineers speculate that when the fog set in this morning and the ship's crew fired up its high-powered radar, that signal damaged a sensitive component in the satellite gear housed in a dome not far from the radar. Such is one of the many complications we face when trying to create and feed television so far from land. The satellite team is now debating sending an aircraft out from St. John's to drop the necessary parts by parachute into the sea so that the boat crew can retrieve them.
Stephen Reverand is Executive Producer and Vice President of Special Projects for Discovery Channel.
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