Tuesday Port Cleaning

A few videos of the system recorded during a weekly port cleaning. We see a lot of lobster and a lot of growth on the frame and cameras.

Helical Diatom Chains

We seem to be in the midst of a nice diatom bloom with many images of helical chains appearing in both of the cameras. A few are shown below:

Screen grab from SPC2

eucampia_grab

Individual Images from SPCP2

spcp2_eucampia1spcp2_eucampia2

spcp2_eucampia3

Monday Port Cleaning

It has now been just over one month since the cameras were first deployed and so far they are working very well. Paul did another port cleaning today in the colder water to remove some small amount of growth on the view ports. Aside from the view ports, the rest of the housings, cables, cage, etc. are covered in a thick layer of green-brown algal growth.

Port cleaning

A quick snorkel today to clean the optical ports and check that the pumps are still running well. There is a lot of growth on everything except for the optical ports and copper parts. The water is green and full of small kelp fragments from the recent swell. Again the SPC2 strobe port shows the most growth of the four ports, but it is miminal.

Biofouling on SPC2 Strobe View Port

With the increased swell and wind early this week, we saw an increase in the amount of growth on cameras. The strobe view port of the SPC2 is facing upward and exposed to direct sunlight during the day. As a result the fouling was too much for the water cleaning system and some growth manged to take hold on the port. This caused some of the imaged objects to have a light background instead of the typical dark background. After a quick snorkel and manual cleaning today the port is free of growth and the image quality is back to normal. The water jet on this port was also adjusted to maximize fluid velocity over the port surface. We’ll wait and see if this help mitigate growth in the future.