Dear Anais,

The wind is like it was last night, but the seas are a bit higher, responding to the wind, so we are not going to be able to launch ROPOS today at all. The Tully did in fact arrive as planned, and we can see it off in the distance across the gray sea.

Le Olson and the basket of line

We are about to lower the line basket, the basket containing 8,000 meters of line, to the ocean floor. We have to put it in an area about 40 meters across. To do this, we'll try to maneuver it into position by moving the ship on the surface of the water. This is not so easy. We are, after all, 2,300 meters above our 40 meter target. We've tied some big, heavy, old chains to the bottom of the basket, so the chains will pull the basket down, and then the basket will, we hope, gently settle to the bottom. Now we don't want the basket to land somewhere where it will fall over, or else we'll never get the line out of it. So this is pretty important.

How do you suppose we'll know exactly where the basket is? The same way we know exactly where ROPOS is. Well put a transponder on it. The transponder sends out a signal and allows us to locate the basket exactly relative to the other transponders we've already placed on the sea floor. We do have one wee problem. As strange as it may seem, we do not know the exact depth from our array of transponders. This is because the exact distance of the transponder from the ship is calculated by measuring the time it takes for sound to travel through the water, but that speed depends on the temperature, amount of salt and other things about the water. For some unknown reason our transponder network is not giving us the exact depth. What we're doing, therefore, is to send something else down first to test the whole process.

This is going to take the whole day, so now it is time for me to return to my writing.

You're not going to believe this. As I am writing this letter, we were just told that a ship is sinking, about two hours away from us. We have been ordered to sail immediately to it. More later...

Papa