The second day of sub training for Chris Hadfield and myself started out cold, grey, and blustery. On the drive out to the Canadian government fisheries research lab where we were conducting our training, I could see a fresh dusting of snow on the trees not very far up the mountains north of Vancouver. It must have fallen overnight. At sea level there was only rain, but there was a strong breeze from the southeast just beginning to raise a small swell and a few whitecaps out on the bay.
The first half of the training day was a walkthrough of emergency procedures with instructor Jeff Heaton, in the warmth and comfort of a small upstairs conference room at the lab. Jeff jokingly refers to this part of training as the “we’re all gonna die” lecture. Like a spacecraft, a submarine is a totally enclosed micro-environment surrounded by conditions that won’t support human life. In either type of vehicle, the most serious situations are those that interfere with life support functions. It is these cases that drive the need for step-by-step checklists to follow when things go wrong.
The designers of the DeepWorker understood the risks of operating underwater and built a very safe vehicle. The sub has multiple independent sources of breathing gas, and even a way to use the pilot’s own lungpower to operate the carbon dioxide scrubbers if there should be a problem with the electrically-driven fans. The sub can return to the surface via any one of three different methods even after a total loss of its electric thrusters. The only hazard that can’t be solved through design is getting stuck or entangled so that the sub can’t get back to the surface. The pilot has to rely on his or her own good judgment to avid that scenario.
After lunch, Chris and I climbed into our trusty submarines for an afternoon of practical work. Fortunately the wind had calmed down and the sea state remained unchallenging. We moved away from the dock, and descended to the bottom of the bay. Jeff talked us through a few emergency drills, step by step. We tried swapping to backup electrical power, using a strap-on mask to breathe through the CO2 scrubbers with the fans powered off, switching to an alternate oxygen supply, ascending to the surface using only the compressed-air ballast tank, and reacting to an imaginary fire in the cockpit. All of those exercises went smoothly.
For the next phase of the lesson, Chris and I spent some time trying to locate two sonar targets out in the bay. The morning’s wave action had stirred up the sediment so that the visibility was even worse than the day before. Jeff would give us a bearing and range to the target, and we’d stare at our sonar screens and try to determine which smeary, shifting blob of color was the sonar target. This was quite tough. Twice we homed in on each other’s submarine without intending to. Chris found a piece of PVC pipe. I was stalking a promising sonar target when it suddenly materialized out of the green gloom a meter in front of me: a huge, dark, towering mass festooned with waving snaky growths. What the heck?! Something out of an H. P. Lovecraft story? No, just an old wooden piling covered with foot-long tube worms. OK, there was some of the sea life I had wanted to observe.
Leaving the piling, I did have some success (with a lot of help from the surface) finding the two sonar targets and using my robot arm to grab them, pick them up, and move them to new locations. It feels like quite an accomplishment to find anything in such low visibility.
By the time the day ended, I’d completed a three-hour dive and was feeling very comfortable in the sub. I felt like I had a good grasp of the systems, and could get the machine to do what I wanted without undue effort. It’s a pleasant feeling.
Tomorrow we expect another half day in the sub, after which we’ll be certified drivers, ready to ply the calm, clear waters of Pavilion Lake!
-Stan
