Slow and steady
"I move slow and steady,
But I feel like a waterfall"
-"Slow and Steady" by Of Monsters and Men
Well, friends, my project is coming along, slowly but surely. As you can imagine, things are a bit complicated in the Arctic.
The big event of the day was picking up the underwater drill that will be used to bolt my settlement plates to their proper locations. It had just arrived from the mainland on a cargo ship. The drill is necessary because while some of my plates will be deployed on moorings, the majority of them will be bolted directly into the substrate - attached either to a cement pier or a vertical rock wall in the fjord.
This drill, as you can imagine, is pretty intense. The technology is nothing spectacular, the drill being powered by compressed air from the divers' SCUBA tanks, but it's very heavy. Rusted out in parts. Gnarly. What impressed me most were the drill bits - all in varying sizes, with different tip shapes intended for different materials. Whoever bought this drill thought of pretty much everything.
Peter pulled a bolt out of the box and explained to me why it would probably be the best option for securing my plates. This particular bolt has a metal ring on the end that goes into the rock, so that when you screw a nut onto it, the bolt is pulled slightly backwards out of the substrate, and the ring locks into place. The tension makes the bolt impossible to remove.
My next task is to buy or find approximately 80 such bolts by Monday. Peter and I visited Longyearbyen's one hardware store but found it closed for the day - at 4 pm. I guess when there's zero competition, shop owners can do as they please. We'll go back in the morning.
It looks like we'll be able to go for a survey dive to the Longyearbyen pier tomorrow morning, as soon as the UNIS dive officer approves the mission. With any luck, I'll have a set of settlement plates deployed by the end of the day tomorrow; the divers will know what to do, and I can feel confident my project is in good hands.
Slow and steady. Slow and steady.
But I feel like a waterfall"
-"Slow and Steady" by Of Monsters and Men
Well, friends, my project is coming along, slowly but surely. As you can imagine, things are a bit complicated in the Arctic.
The big event of the day was picking up the underwater drill that will be used to bolt my settlement plates to their proper locations. It had just arrived from the mainland on a cargo ship. The drill is necessary because while some of my plates will be deployed on moorings, the majority of them will be bolted directly into the substrate - attached either to a cement pier or a vertical rock wall in the fjord.
This drill, as you can imagine, is pretty intense. The technology is nothing spectacular, the drill being powered by compressed air from the divers' SCUBA tanks, but it's very heavy. Rusted out in parts. Gnarly. What impressed me most were the drill bits - all in varying sizes, with different tip shapes intended for different materials. Whoever bought this drill thought of pretty much everything.
Peter pulled a bolt out of the box and explained to me why it would probably be the best option for securing my plates. This particular bolt has a metal ring on the end that goes into the rock, so that when you screw a nut onto it, the bolt is pulled slightly backwards out of the substrate, and the ring locks into place. The tension makes the bolt impossible to remove.
My next task is to buy or find approximately 80 such bolts by Monday. Peter and I visited Longyearbyen's one hardware store but found it closed for the day - at 4 pm. I guess when there's zero competition, shop owners can do as they please. We'll go back in the morning.
It looks like we'll be able to go for a survey dive to the Longyearbyen pier tomorrow morning, as soon as the UNIS dive officer approves the mission. With any luck, I'll have a set of settlement plates deployed by the end of the day tomorrow; the divers will know what to do, and I can feel confident my project is in good hands.
Slow and steady. Slow and steady.
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