The single most
popular souvenir is the Styrofoam cup. A regular sized coffee cup
will have all of the air squeezed out of it by the tremendous
pressure of the oceans depths and come back the size of a thimble. If
you write clearly with a waterproof marker you can still read it
after the shrinking. People will put the dive number and the
scientists name along with the location. Many put their kid’s names
on them for show and tell at school.
Other forms of
Styrofoam came out. Mike Nolan sent a 6-pack cooler down that came
back in beautiful shape. It would hold 1 can of beer. Wig heads were
cool. They would come back about the size of something you would
stick on a pencil. I learned how to give them hair by sticking
strands of Poly Pro line in the scalp with a small screwdriver. The
“follicles” would close up as the head shrank and held the hair
in place.
Most of the time the volume of cups is easy to handle by using a mesh laundry bag. There was this one time though that that didn’t quite work out.
It was 1986 and we
were over the wreck of the Titanic. The U.S. Navy was paying for this
show and they brought a lot of people along. So many that they had to
bring their own ship, the U.S.S. Ortolon. She was a submarine rescue
vessel but they were using her as a hotel. There would be several
transfers ship to ship each day. The Ortolon was full ship with about
450 men aboard. For their souvenirs they sent over many trash bags
full of cups. It was an overwhelming volume of cups!
One big problem
with cups is that if one slides inside another and then shrinks they
will never come apart again. My solution to this was to string them
like pop corn on a Christmas tree. I used a narrow cotter pin and a
20 ft piece of thin but strong nylon line.
I threaded the cups
butt to butt and open end to open end to keep them apart. We did 4 of
these 20 ft. strings and it didn’t even put a dent in the pile of
trash bags of cups. Back by the motor controllers on Alvin is a
cavity that is protected by the sub's skin that would hold the cups
nicely. To get them in there we stuffed them through a limber hole at
the top of the skin. Limber holes let water or air flow in and out of
this cavity easily. I should say now that this limber hole was
located about 6 inches from the port aft thruster.
Ralph had the
first dive. He got to the bottom but didn’t stay long due to a
flooded battery tank. Alvin was on deck by noon and we worked all
night to get it ready for the next day. It was a short dive but long
enough to get the cups shrunk. The next day we doubled our efforts
and stuffed twice as many strings of cups in that cavity as the day
before. A piece of duct tape and we were good to go. A brilliant
plan. Dudley had the second dive down to the wreck. Everything was
going smooth till midday when Dudley called up and said the port aft
thruster was not working. No big deal, he just disabled it and
continued on for the rest of a normal dive. We never put 2 and 2
together at this point.
After running his
batteries down on a full day at the bottom Dudley dropped his weights
and headed for the surface. 2 ½ hours later he popped up right where
we expected him to. The little white sub with the orange sail and
hundreds of white dots floating all around it. What the hell is
that?! That, is all those damned cups! I guess when the duct tape
gave way covering the limber hole that port aft thruster sucked up
those cups like Auntie Em’s house in a twister! I must have pulled
60 yards of that nylon line from around the shaft of that thruster.
That’s what caused it to fault out. Oops!!
Well, no harm no
foul I say. Losing the thruster during the dive didn’t slow Dudley
down. The Navy boys lost some cups but they had bags full more to go.
And to top it all off we got 3 hours of overtime to replace the blown
motor controller. Not a bad day after all!
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