A great day at sea, a bit cold (-4) but low wind and calm sea. We sailed from the harbor of Reykjavik on the research boat Sæmundur Fróði.

A mission project was an underwater search and preliminary survey on possible man-made objects, wreck site?, near Reykjavik.

The day mission was a collaboration between the University of Iceland Research Center of West fjords and the Research center of the Southern Peninsula.

Remotely operated vehicle (ROV)

The main tool for the job was BlueROV2, a heavy configuration, from BlueRobotics. This ROV has a 300-meter tether cable and additional 4 powerful LED lights of a total of 6000 lumens, which can brighten up the underwater world.

The ROV was connected to a weatherproof Dell laptop which served as a flight controller where we could see the live video feed in 1080 HD. The BlueROV was then controlled via Xbox One handheld remote controller.

SURVEY WORK

Everything worked out as planned, and we did also carry our SCUBA gear with us if we need to dive additional to the ROV work/survey.

Unknown shipwreck ?

On our way back to the harbor, we took a small detour and checked a target which we surveyed in 2015 with a Side Scan Sonar. We believe that´s an old uncharted shipwreck. A man-made object was there most likely. More surveys on that location need to be done to be sure.

Awesome dive / survey day.