Denman Marine Voyage

Introduction

In 2025 I was one of the fortunate few selected for the Denman Marine Science Voyage. This was the first dedicated marine science voyage of the RSV Nuyina. My title onboard was that of a senior science systems engineer, my responsibilities being to provide technical support for marine science operations and science systems on board the ship, and in particular to support the Towed Camera platform, the Beam Trawl and their respective EOM cables and topside equipment.

Towed Camera

Towed Camera on the aft deck

The towed camera is as is described, a platform towed behind the ship that carries a camera. The towed camera is actually three cameras. Two navigation cameras for the crew who “fly” the camera using the winch, keeping it around 2 meters above the sea floor. Then there is the main camera, this is a Voyis Discovery, a stereoscopic camera (which is actually two cameras), that takes high resolution pairs of images, with four very bright strobe lights, that can generate point clouds.

Voyis Discovery Camera

This means scientists don’t just get imagery of the sea floor, using the point clouds they can generate 3D maps of the sea floor, and measure the size of marine life we image. I’ve written almost all the topside software for the towed camera, but there is the occasional bug, hence why I’m on board. With me was Roland, my coworker who designed and built with Kym our manager and lead engineer all of the topside infrastructure.

Roland and I preparing for a presentation

On this voyage I tried to take a back seat rather than be the lead platform engineer, so that my coworkers could get experience operating the towed camera. Running a system such as the Towed Camera requires quite a lot of setup, as there are so many subsystems:

• Topside Power Supply (800V DC)
• Insulation Resistance Monitor (so if the cable breaks no one gets electrocuted on the aft deck)
• Subsurface Power Supply (converts 800V to 24V)
• Navigation Lights and Cameras
• Voyis Discovery Camera and Strobe Lights
• Sonar Altimeters
• USBL (Underwater Acoustic Positioning System)
• Science Data Logging Systems
• Video Recording Systems

Video of the towed camera software in operation

Training one of my coworkers how to operate the Towed Camera in the Science Operations room

Beam Trawl

The beam trawl, with the trolley for mounting the Voyis camera, its not to heavy, but its very expensive!

The beam trawl is specific type of trawl net for trawling the sea floor. while there are other types of trawl nets like Demersal trawls for catching fish near the sea floor, the beam trawl is designed for science trawling. It has “tickler” chains at the front of the frame that flick marine life such as sponges, sea stars, coral and even worms up from the sea floor and into the net at the rear of the frame. The Beam Trawl is unforunately quite a destructive piece of science equipment, like a bulldozer, we even nicknamed our two frames Komatsu and Catepillar, but as it literally takes a slice of the sea floor and the meter and a half above it, no other method is as effective at getting sample of marine life.

Our Beam Trawls also run the Voyis camera so that we get high resolution imagery of what the sea floor looked like before we turned it into a road, we do have navigation cameras. This means we can “fly” the beam trawl above the sea floor before touching down. If we find the sea floor has big boulders or is a teeming with marine diversity, then we see this on the sea floor and abort touching down.

EOM Cables

Preparing to epoxy the termination

One of my primary reasons for being onboard is for the Electro-Optical-Mechanical EOM cables. The Nuyina has four EOM cables, these are steel armoured cable which can sustain decent mechanical loading, and have electrical conductors for sending power, and optical fibres for communicating with deep sea marine equipment such as the Towed Camera, Beam Trawl and CTD platforms. Where the cable enters the subsea electronics pressure housing, the cable terminates into a part called the termination. This part has to let the optical fibres and copper conductors pass into a pressure housing without letting the water in. The water is at 600 Bar at 6km depth, the rating of our system. This is equivalent to a 600kg load being applied to every square centimeter of the pressure housing.

Assembling the termination is quite the task, 161 steps to be exact, and it involves precisely cutting the cable, assembling the termination hardware, epoxying it, letting it set under vacuum, then assembling an electical connector on the inside of the housings endcap, and fusion splicing the fibres to their own optical connectors. Its really easy to break optical fibres at every step of this two day process.

Unfortunately for me, Deep Tow cable didn’t unspool with enough load at one point of the voyage, and the cable got kinked, and when a load was applied, the tight bend radius caused the internal optical fibres to get severed. This meant our team had to re-terminate the cable while at sea. We were able to do so and get the beam trawl cameras up and running again.

Other Science Support

While at sea we also provided a lot of other technical support to scientists aboard, this included operating equipment such as the CTD, an large oceanographic system that measures water quality parameters through the whole water column from the surface to seabed, and can collect water samples at any depth. We also operated the Moving Vessel Profiler, a smaller CTD that can continuosly dive and surface on a winch as it is towed behind the ship.

MVP on deck about to be attached to its winch cable

Another more hands on task was fabricating some sieves for the benthic scientists. On some of the trawls the beam trawl would also collect a lot of sediment in the net, so these allowed the scientists to filter animals from the mud.

Life after onboard after shift

Antarctica is an awesome environment, while aboard the scenery, when I braved the -27°C weather, was phenomenal. We also got up to a lot social activities including a sports carnival, played Assassin.

Assassin

Assassin, also known as Mafia, Were-Wolves, Vampires etc. is a social role-playing game played onboard. In the game each person playing is given a target, you must assassinate them by sneaking up to them and tapping a glove to their back, while simulatenously someone else playing is trying to assassinate you. Whenever you get a kill you take their target, onboard the Nuyina we have a few rules such as one example is the mess, and everyones work area being safe zones so you can eat and work without being distracted.

CCTV captured my death while working on the CTD frame

The Telescope

I brought aboard my $15 tip shop telescope. While we passed the RV Investigator, CSIRO’s research vessel, which was over the horizon, I managed to spot it and get a photo of the top of its radar mast through the telescope, despite the motion of the Nuyina.

The Investigators radar mast

The telescope itself

UFOs and Aliens

Onboard we celebrated alien abduction day, our Voyage Leader brought aboard an alien costume and filmed a short film were I was abducted despite my co-workers efforts to save me. While aboard the scientists deliver science presentations, so one of our engineers, Nick, delivered a parody science share on April Fools about the “Science Operations” team’s secret priority objective, UFO research.

Dance Parties

Some of the scientists organised some dance parties. The best one was on the last night of the voyage, dancing out on the heli-deck with glow sticks until the strobe light of Maatsuyker light house appeared. Signalling we were close to home after 70 days at sea.

Antarctic Photography

Below is a collection of images I captured while we were at sea

Auroras

It is hard to get a decent long exposure on a moving ship. These won’t win any awards, but they show you how bright they are.

Wildlife

Scientists preparing to attempt to tag a seal with a satellite tracking tag

Ships

Navy Destroyer of Burnie

Sunsets

Ice and Snow

A “Jade Berg”

Snow on the trawl deck