“Stop the ship!” Dan yelled into the intercom to the bridge. Two minutes later what started as a day filled with expectation, ended in hard work and disappointment.

After a smooth and successful deployment of the WHOI digital towed camera yesterday morning, we began taking pictures of the seafloor on the northwest rift zone of Fernandina at a depth of 1700 meters. The tow was intended to give us a look at what we thought would be the freshest, and some of the youngest, submarine lava flows in the area. It would also provide data Jenny Engels could use to compare this area with the first tow images we saw on Sept. 6 from the young-looking flows in deeper water, far away from the rift.

At 10:46 a.m. the ship was merrily pulling along the camera at 1/3 knot and about 8 meters off the bottom - an ideal height to take deep-sea pictures. Then: Whamo! The tension on the tow wire started increasing. We paid out the wire, but the tension continued to increase - fast. Dan called the bridge. In the seconds it takes for the ship to stop, the steel trawl wire broke.

The towed camera is blind to features directly ahead of it and sometimes the subtle contours of the seafloor become difficult hurdles. We think the camera caught a tall, steep-sided lava formation that we were unable to see either on the pinger trace, which tells us how far the camera is above the seafloor, or on our sonar maps. The multibeam sonar maps cannot image tall, thin chimney-like features. The maps can only tell if features are taller than 10 meters if they are wider than a football field.

The rest of the morning and into the late afternoon, the Revelle’s Engineering Department, the Resident Tech., and the Seamen all helped to haul the 500 meters of wire that was hanging below the ship safely back on board. After much discussion it was decided that it would be much too risky to try to grapple for the sled. This would be like dangling a fishing line and hook off a 1700-meter-high building and trying to catch a gold ring.

“It's always tough when something like this happens,” Dan said. “But the ship’s crew was terrific - they gave it 200% effort.” When you do work near the bottom of the ocean, there are always lots of risks to equipment. Marine scientists try to avoid most of them with available technology, but sometimes, King Neptune gets his way.

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