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Long Haul

January 3, 2018

Crabs and shrimp investigate a cast-steel anchor for a mooring resting 125 meters below the surface at the Pioneer Array, an ocean observatory off the Massachusetts coast operated by WHOI and funded by the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observatories Initiative. When moorings are recovered, technicians use a hauling line to recover the anchor too. In this case, a spool containing the hauling line for this anchor was fouled, and the anchor could not be retrieved as planned. Instead, a remotely operated undersea vehicle from the University of Connecticut was used to attach an alternate recovery line (blue line), which enabled a successful anchor retrieval. (Photo courtesy of ROV Kraken-2, University of Connecticut)