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Here's another post from Frida, oceans campaigner on the Rainbow Warrior (see her previous post here).

Sometimes when you depend on someone it is easy to become very annoyed and disappointed with them, even when they are not really to blame for the thing that does not go exactly as planned. For me, one of those characters here on the ship is Lars. Lars (Launch and Retrieval System - L.A.R.S) is the hydraulic crane that launches and retrieves the so far unnamed drop camera rig we are using to document the cold water corals in the deep waters below us - here off the coast of Norway.

On Thursday night it all started off so well. We caught a lucky break and got a nice window of clear and relatively calm weather. We quickly devised a scheme in order to be able to work with the camera through the night, making sure we hade enough people to handle Lars, operate the camera controls and log the video material. Getting the people together was a fairly simple task, but as it turned out getting the cooperation from both Lars and the drop camera was another matter.

We did our first test drop of the camera during a beautiful sunset and got some great images from our 'training grounds' - mostly sandy bottom, fish and occasionally - corals. It was when we started to move to the more densely populated coral areas that our luck started to run out. First Lars developed an electrical short circuit that made it impossible for us to launch the camera for our first drop over the bigger coral structures. Annoying!

But, taking in to consideration that Lars is a very old mechanical beast and that he did come around after we lovingly re-wired and re-isolated his electrical components, I did manage to forgive him after a few hours. But the problems did not end with Lars.

As soon as we got him back on line the camera rig started to show us some of its more uncooperative sides. The rig, taking a cue from Lars, suddenly developed an electrical malfunction of it’s own - making sure we would be busy with other things than watching handsome corals on our monitors. Instead, every time we tried to turn up the voltage to get enough light to see the bottom clearly the rig simply switched them off again. Without enough light we have absolutely no way of knowing how close we are to the bottom and you need to be really careful not to bump in to any large stones, corals or fishing gear. All very frustrating stuff when you know we only have so much time before the weather turns bad again and we have to go back in to port.

Then it all got brighter again. After several hours of intense work by our electricians and perhaps one hour of sleep for me - the rig started working properly again. And just as important, the weather gave us almost 7 more clear and sunny hours.

This work can be frustrating at times but it is a learning experience! I have realised that documenting life 300 meters under water is difficult but we managed it thanks to the good crew and a pair of really good electricians onboard. Despite all the uncooperative technology, we did mange to get some very nice documentation of corals and building on our experiences we have a good chance at getting some great stuff in the days to come.

Frida

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