Unexpected Findings

Guess what we found today! No not an old dead fish, no not some fishing line with hooks tangled in our cables (although we did find that 2 days ago), no not oil, but a… keep reading… We finished our job 3 days ago, and since then have spent our time bringing in 2 (of 8) 6km cables for repair. Yesterday we deployed the 2 cables (about 6 hours per cable to deploy). Now we are on our way to the new site. (our new site is located at the very tip of India. If you draw a line from the tip directly south and then a line from Columbo Sri Lanka due west, our new site is where they intersect.)

But what did we find? As we were streaming along, there was suddenly a lot of noise coming up from our cables. Think seismograph that just has straight lines and then suddenly there are a lot of up and down. First guess – earthquake, but looking at the lines and how they hit the cables, the arrival of the waves was not that of an earthquake. The choice – submarine! We called the bridge (where the captain and chief mate and all the steering equipment is) to ask (kind of jokingly) if they knew about the sub. They did, but for a different reason. On their radar they had seen a small blip and assumed it was a small fishing boat, however it was headed straight for our cables, so they sent one of our chase boats after it. By the time the chase boat got there, there was nothing and it had disappeared off of the radar screen. The sub thus dove under our cables!

Now we are about 45 km away and just hanging tight until we get there. We are moving at 4.5 knots, so we still have a bit of time (and its why I’m able to write this while I’m working!)