July 6th
Drills, work and more drills.
After breakfast we had a timed abandon ship drill where we had to get to our
assigned life boat and don our survival suite. Now was a good time to realize
the suit didn’t fit me. Looked a little ridiculous in my huge, very very thick
neoprene suite but it would certainly do it job in preventing hypothermia. Our
life boats are inflatable and stored inside barrel-sized canisters that look
like depth charges. We also receive an orientation to the dive locker and given
a runthrough of how the loading and launching process will go for each small
craft. Each science team is assigned to a particular boat, and for each boat
everyone has to be familiar with the staging area for gear, and how to load
tanks and equipment in a quick, efficient and safe manner.
For the unconscious diver, possible
neck injury diver drill, I decided to make things interesting by by
volunteering to play the victim, which means other crew members had to get my
body on the flatboard, strap me down in some really strong Velcro so that I
couldn’t move the slightest bit, and then get picked up and carried around.
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