My dearest Anais,

Eureka! We did it! At 11:40 a.m. at our station here above the Juan de Fuca Ridge, a sulfide chimney, albeit a small one, was hauled onto the deck of the Tully. Okay, okay, it's only 5-feet high, and it probably weighs a mere 1,200 to 1,500 pounds. But it's pretty cool nonetheless.We had to zoom over to the Tully in the Thompson's small boat to take a quick look. Some whitish looking bacteria-like stuff had been growing on the outside, and also a few other small creatures were living there, but in general the outside seems to have not too much on it at all. It's massive, blackish, and the surface is irregular. It's about 30 inches across, and the inside has some channel-ways about the size of your wrist. Despite being tough, it appears to have a lot of small pores. The chimney broke in three pieces and the top fell off; it sort of looks like a huge log.

Smaller of the two pieces brought up.

This is the structure we have been calling Phang, which is more or less what it looked like on the ocean floor. Last night, after photographing it on all sides, ROPOS slowly and very delicately placed the cage over Phang. As we all watch on the TV monitors in the control room, it grasped, one after the other, the cables which by that time we had around Phang and pulled them tight, making three nooses holding it in place. At this point, the chimney cracked horizontally. ROPOS was moved to the base of the structure and the chain saw started. The saw worked very nicely, at least, until something broke and it stopped before we were able to make much of a cut. (Although I know it means absolutely nothing to you, a leak developed in one of the hydraulic lines.) ROPOS attached the line from the basket to a big steel ring to which the cables holding Phang were attached, and then we brought it back to the surface. We had seen many horizontal cracks and were not sure if this meant that the structures would break along them or not, but we suspected they would. So we figured we'd just pull.

This morning, we were ready to go. Two ships, 100 people, three years of planning...the moment had arrived to see if we could raise our first structure. This is what happened. First, the accoustic release was activated on the line basket (you remember the line basket with all that carefully and precisely stacked line), which released floats. The floats, holding one end of the line floated to the surface. A transponder had been mounted on the floats, allowing us to track it all the way to the surface and know about where it would come up. Before it arrived, we launched the small boat to recover the float and attached line as soon as they reached the surface and to bring the line to the Tully. Once safely on the Tully, the end of the line was strung through a giant pully (more properly called a block or sheave) on the A-frame and then fed into an even more gigantic winch sitting on its deck. The Tully then just raised the whole thing, easy as that. The chimney broke into three pieces, but they were all recovered.

Pulling in 8000 feet of line used to bring up Phang.

We are about to start transferring the line back to this ship, the Thompson, so we can do the whole thing again in a day or two. This is somewhat more difficult than one might imagine. The line, after all, is 8,000 feet long. Getting it tangled would not exactly be like having a knot in your shoelace. Plus, the line has two different ends, and the end we want came up first and thus is on the bottom of the huge heap presently sitting on the fantail of the Tully. The line floats, so the Tully will let all 8,000 feet of line stretch out in the ocean behind it and then give us the end. Well then haul it onto this ship and spend the next 14 hours carefully laying it in its basket. So simple...

Oh, about our rescue adventure, now a seeming distant memory. You read the account written by Peter Tysen, right? (I sent it to you, but its also on the NOVA web page.) It turns out the boat finally sank. The two guys on it were transferred to the Tully and are safe.

A big hug and a kiss, Papa