 |
 |
|
Ralph
Hollis piloting the Alvin at the Galapagos Rift
|
|
One
man who never got lost in Alvin is long-time pilot
Ralph Hollis who was at Alvin's helm on more than
one historic occasion and took James Childress down many times.
After he retired from the Air Force as an electronics instructor,
Hollis moved to Cape Cod where he tried to enter civilian
life as a real estate agent. When that didn't pan out, he
answered an ad in the paper. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
was seeking an electronics technician for Alvin. With
his military background and electronic expertise, Hollis joined
the Alvin crew in 1975.
 |
|
|
Swimmers
recovering Alvin after a dive. Photo by C. Martinez
|
|
Hollis
didn't really like going to sea for ten-month long expeditions.
And he wasn't the only one. Sticking it out, however, had
some benefits. "It's hard to get the good people to go to
sea because most of them don't want to leave their families,"
says Hollis. "Everybody got tired of it, and they'd quit.
Each time somebody quit, I'd move up a position."
Within
five years, Hollis was Alvin's chief pilot. But, over
the course of its life, Alvin has been overhauled and
re-tooled about once every three years. People at Woods Hole
joke that there are no original parts of Alvin left
but the name. That's one reason Hollis never found his job
boring. "Just working at Woods Hole is exciting. To be in
charge of Alvin is even more exciting. But I think
it took me about ten years to really feel confident," he recalls.
"You really have to know the sub well, do a lot of dives."
Hollis
logged hundreds of dives before he retired in 1989. Not surprisingly,
he is full of good stories. Like the time he and Bob Ballard
dove down to look for the Titanic . . . and the sonar failed.
"So, we were down there sitting right next to the Titanic,
but we couldn't pick it up on sonar. We were driving back
and forth, back and forth. We must have come within twenty
feet of it, but we couldn't see that far. Then there was a
very slight beep on the sonar," Hollis remembers. "And I followed
that beep, and we bumped into the Titanic."
 |
|
|
A
view of the bow of the Titanic from a camera mounted
on the outside of the Mir I submersible. Credit: NOAA
|
|
Despite
his pivotal role in the historic expedition, Hollis remains
humbled by what he saw there. "The nice part about it was
coming up over the bow, along the foredeck. It was a nice
trip," he recalls. "But it was very spooky, very quiet. It's
like a cemetery." Although Hollis retired from WHOI more than
15 years ago to help his wife finish raising their two boys
and to leave Cape Cod for Florida's warmer winters, he is
still proud of the technical changes he suggested and oversaw
in the little sub. "The weights were in a bad place," he says
of the ballast Alvin drops to surface. "They used to catch
on rocks, and the weights would fall off and you'd start going
up before you meant to. I had them moved to make it safer."
Hollis
remains proprietary about Alvin. He still feels irritated
about a technician who messed up the sonar system or another
pilot who got Alvin so mired in mud she was almost "stuck
there forever." He rattles off the names of benthic crabs
and geologic formations countless scientists needed him to
look for. "The pilot gets forced into learning all that because
I'm the only one who sees forward, and the two scientists
see down and to the right and down and to the left," he says
of the cockpit's cramped quarters. "So the pilot has to be
able to look for what the scientist wants and identify it
for him."
 |
|
Alvin's manipulator reaches
toward a black smoker chimney, seen through the sub's
viewport. There's plenty left to discover for the
next generation of submersibles. Credit: © Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institutions.
|
|
After
forty years of service, Alvin logged its 4000th dive in April
2004. Today, WHOI scientists and engineers are collaborating
to build the vessel that will replace what for many has been
the world's most successful deep-diving manned submersible. Alvin's successor will be faster, more maneuverable, more
comfortable and able to reach more of the ocean floor. While
it will always be Alvin that first took humans to places we
had never seen before, we still know less about the deep ocean
then we do about the surface of the moon. There's plenty left
for the next sub to do.
--------------------------
3 pages: | 1 | 2
| 3 |
|
