March 19th, 2010

The mast of the buoy broken after deployment. Meteorological instrumentation damaged.

Last Tuesday 16 of March, the oceanographic buoy was successfully deployed on board the B/O García del Cid at a new mooring location in the Blanes Canyon head. For the new location we followed instructions of local fishermen that were complaining about interferences produced by buoy mooring with their fishing activities. It is worthy to note that coordinates of the original mooring location was provided by themselves.

Unfortunately, in the very morning of Wednesday 17th, we were unable to communicate with the datalogger. When we approached to the mooring location of the buoy we found, with great surprise, that the mast holding the meteorological instrumentation was broken out and instrumentation was hanging underwater.

We then started an emergency protocol in order to recover the instrumentation in the mast and to take the buoy out of water for onshore repairing.

This operation was performed, in part on board the B/O García del Cid and in part on board the CEAB's vessel "Dolores". Once we all were on board "Dolores", the wind started blowing strongly so that the diving operation was a bit difficult to carry out. Fortunately, at the end all was successfully done.

At present, the buoy is being repared in the Blanes port, whereas new meteorological instrumentation is being acquired. We plan deploying the buoy back to the mooring site within a few weeks, as soon as all new instrumentation will be available and operational.

Some instants of the operations on board: