After 7 years of planning and 3-4 months of frantic building, moving the submersible from the factory to the ship was a big deal.

We are engineers; we could have each spent another 6 months working on our parts of the system, but Jim was on a schedule and perfection would just have to take a back seat to safe and functional.

所以我们在那里。在早晨的凌晨，在小雨中，看着起重机非常小心地将我们的地下深海挑战者抬到平板卡车的后部。

接待我们的船和探险队的潜艇称为美人鱼蓝宝石(PDF with more details）。她主要用于油线检查和维修。在我们的情况下，平坦的后甲板和起重机吸引了使用她进行探险的吸引力。

上面的照片是在悉尼的码头上拍摄的，当时她在海上搭配卫星菜肴中安装了卫星菜肴。

The very first "dive" with the sub was simply a flotation test. We needed to know how much buoyancy the sub had in order to make any necessary changes to the syntactic foam layout.

It was also a good chance for the crew to practice the launch and recovery of the sub off the back of the ship for the first time while everything was still (the ship was moored to the wharf).

这是第一次测试发布的照片​​。


For this test the pilot sphere was mostly empty; with just a few diving belt weights instead of the pilot, she is hanging a little top heavy.

The two sets of gray air bags keep her level once she hits the water. If the systems check out, the bags near the pilot sphere are released and the sub pivots in the water. The pilot is then sitting upright (rather than lying on his back with his feet in the air like at launch and recovery).

If the systems pass their final check, the pilot then calls out over the radio, "Release release release," and the top set of airbags is detached and the sub starts its dive.

After this test dive, the next took place later that night with Jim in the sub for the first time.

第一次潜水令人难忘，原因是我们以某种方式与吉姆（Jim）如何保持操纵杆的控件感到困惑。他以与我们对其进行编程的方式相反的方式。这意味着几乎每个控制都倒退了。这既可以在软件中很容易修复，又有一点可笑...电影深海挑战3D。(Added to the controls snafu was the fact that the sonar display was also flipped, so to Jim it looked like the hull of the Mermaid Sapphire was at the bottom of Sydney harbor).

All that aside, the tests were a massive success and we headed out to sea to a sheltered bay just south of Sydney for more tests.

It was while in this bay that atragic helicoper accident took two of the team。安德鲁·赖特（Andrew Wright）和迈克·德格鲁伊（Mike Degruy）在拍摄潜艇发射之一的路上从机场起飞时被杀。

It put a huge shock through the team. We were all away from our families and the danger of what we were doing was clear. It was tough, but the decision to press on with the dive program was made and so we set off north, first to Papua New Guinea to start to really dive deep and then on to Guam for the big one.

当您到处到达时，这就是称为运输。There is no diving of the sub going on, but there is still plenty of work to do.

Each of us had our main sub-related jobs to do, but we also picked up a heap of other bits and pieces along the way.
这是我整理许多备件的照片。

是的，我利用了北部的途中的平静海洋，以清洁剃须。当大海崎rough时，我们都会长胡须。

One of the things we all had to get used to was having the camera in your face all the time. And when I say camera. I mean 3D IMAX-sized camera. These things are massive!

从我们醒来到潜艇入睡的时间，这些家伙在那里记录了所有动作。到了您根本没有注意到它们的地步。您非常专注于手头的工作，而您习惯了电影摄制组，以至于他们只是团队的一员。

该博客及其照片的缺点之一是，您不会听到船上的生活。当我们准备潜水时，船将使用它的动态定位系统to maintain a single, fixed position. While it was running the hydraulics for the DP system it would, uh, make a bit of noise... through the entire ship. There was nowhere you could go to escape it.

是的。尝试想象醒来，吃早餐，举行团队会议，编程，培训，调试等等，等等。几乎每天，三个月。

What you're seeing in the video is Jim getting into the sub for the pre-dive checks. We had a roughly 80-point checklist that the pilot had to go through and sign off on before each dive.

在最后，您可以看到约翰（左侧的生命支持人员）手吉姆一只小麦克风。噪音太多，我们让飞行员将麦克风戴在舱口旁边的放大器上。这样，他就不必在潜水前检查中大喊舱口。

船上的生活是一种使潜水艇准备潜水，然后在每次潜水后改善/修复潜艇的模式。他们是漫长的日子，经常彼此模糊。

我们中的一些人从来没有过海腿，因此花费了大多数过境和一些潜水感到非常恶心。奇怪的是，这只会在我们尽可能地帮助彼此的情况下增加了团队的精神。

The next blog will be my last on Deepsea Challenge. I'll cover what happened during the dives and offer you the chance to win a t-shirt and copy of the movie.

Till then, cheers Mate.