Saturday, October 18.

Francois writing

There is no weekend in Antarctica. Our time here is too precious and we can’t afford to take much time off, except for sleeping and eating. So we started working at 7:30AM, as usual, hoping to put SCINI in the ocean by the end of the day.

As the mechanical engineer for this project, I’m the one having the most fun. I’m the one who gets to play with all the tools. I spent a good part of the day finalizing the aft thruster. This included potting cables in resin, soldering connectors, drilling and taping holes to mount the thruster, carving flotation foam… Great fun. Meanwhile the  rest of the team was working on the electronics and did an impressive job. When we finally put all the parts together everything worked like a charm: motors turning, LEDs lighting, video camera working… I am making this sound easy but we actually had a number of bugs to work out. By the end of the afternoon, we put SCINI in a small seawater test tank (actually, a large aquarium) and ran it for about an hour. It performed very well, but it was obvious that we wouldn’t have time to test it in the ocean before the end of the day. Maybe tomorrow.

SCINI on the bench in the lab.

We have tested SCINI in tanks before but this was still an exciting moment.

These guys are not joking.

We are still getting sunsets, and they last about three hours. This is the view from the lab’s window.