When Brian Ackerman was working as a chef after graduating from Loyola-Marymount College with a degree in psychology, he lived on a boat moored at Moss Landing, California. Every morning, as he watched the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) Vessel Point Lobos steam out of the harbor, he says he was thinking “I have to get on that boat somehow.”
He started to hang out at the dock, ready to go to work. After a month, he says, “they got sick of seeing me and invited me on board.” Within two years he had earned his captain’s license, and two years later, he was master of the Point Lobos. A large part of his ensuing 15 years at MBARI involved using ROVs, remotely controlled vehicles, for underwater research. Now he has brought that expertise to Maine, establishing a business, Bristol Marine Science and Survey, in July of 2007. His new business offers a Benthal Stingray ROV for a wide variety of jobs.
Ackerman and his wife, Melissa, had come to Maine in the summer of 2006 to help a fellow MBARI researcher, Campbell “Buzz” Scott, run his new nonprofit summer camp, OceansWide. The camp, based in Newcastle, offers an oceanography and marine biology program in the Gulf of Maine. Scott had moved back to Maine to establish the kind of science program he says he wished had been available to him when he was growing up on Matinicus and wondered what was beneath the water’s surface. He wanted to use ROVs as an integral part of the camp program.
Ackerman and his wife had been thinking of moving to an area of the country with seasonal changes, and were so impressed with Maine they decided to re-locate here. They chose to settle in New Harbor because he wanted to be in a working waterfront similar to his location in California, which he says was “one of the last pure commercial harbors” in the state.
Ackerman’s ROV, the Golden Snitch (christened by his six-year-old daughter, a fan of Harry Potter movies), can work and send back images from as deep as 1,000 feet underwater, and could be modified to descend to 3,000 feet. Ackerman says ROVs were initially developed by the oil industry for pipeline surveys, but that “one of the things at Monterey was showing the marine research world that they could be much more than survey tools.
“ROVs can perform highly complicated manipulative tasks at crushing depths,” he explains, “things like drilling horizontally into the ocean floor, installing seismographic monitors and data collectors, and returning to the site to change batteries and do other maintenance.” His jobs have included work on outfalls in Puerto Rico and a survey of cable runs for a wind farm in the United Kingdom.
In March, Ackerman will pack up the Snitch (which is the size of a small coffee table and weighs 100 pounds), and FedEx it and five boxes of ancillary equipment to Granada, where it will recover a mooring for a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution project. “WHOI has scientific gear deployed in a crater outside Granada,” he says. “The instruments are on the sea floor, and were attached to a mooring on the surface. The mooring broke free and all the valuable instruments are still on the bottom with no way to get them back up without sending down an ROV to attach a line. Then the equipment can be pulled up to the ship so the data can be collected.”
Although Ackerman originally intended to work close to home, he has been getting a surprising amount of business from areas outside Maine. “There’s a shortage of qualified personnel around the world for these projects,” he says. Still, he would prefer less travel, and has been exploring opportunities here such as helping aquaculture operations with oyster bed surveys or inspections of salmon pens, assisting in search and rescue operations and working with marine researchers at institutions such as the Darling Marine Center and Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. He recently completed the National Highway Institute course for training in underwater bridge inspection.
Soon he will have his own research vessel, designed by a firm in Damariscotta and built at Rockport Steel. “Most people,” he says, “when they think of ocean ROVs, think big — large vessels with millions spent converting them and millions for outfitting. I’m following the Maine fast food model à la Red’s in Wiscasset: small and manageable. My research vessel is a 28-foot trailerable boat that will be small, light and maneuverable. It can go right up to island ledges, and in and out of lakes and rivers, landing craft style.” He will pull it with his pickup, which can carry the Snitch, other equipment, spare parts, tools and a generator.
One of Ackerman’s greatest interests in utilizing the Snitch is to participate in educational programs that inform Maine youth and adults about underwater habitat and creatures and inspire them to learn more about marine science and the technologies available for marine research. “It really interests me to help train students in these high tech, high paying jobs,” he says, noting that an ROV pilot in the Gulf of Mexico can make $700 a day working for oil companies. In Monterey, he adds, a local college ran a training program in technology for ocean sciences. Perhaps, he hopes, he can help establish something similar with Southern Maine Community College.
Last summer, Ackerman took the Snitch to the Hog Island Audubon Center and gave elderhostel participants and resident naturalists a view of what was going on in Muscongus Bay. Seth Benz of Audubon says the experience was so successful the center plans to have him return in 2008. In October, Ackerman volunteered time to “fly” the Snitch in Portland Harbor for Owls Head students who were participating in Gulf of Maine Research Institute’s LabVenture! program.
Ed Seidel, science translator at GMRI, (he develops materials and programs to inform adults and young people about work being done at the Institute) was previously curator for Monterey Bay Aquarium and knew Ackerman there. “Brian wanted people here to start thinking about how ROVs can be incorporated into their research, so he offered two free days to GMRI,” Seidel says. “We worked with our lab and figured out how to send the live video signal from his equipment to the students in our auditorium so they could see inhabitants of the benthic community like tube anemones, lobsters and shrimp.” By using walkie talkies, the students were able to talk with Ackerman in the ROV command center on the lawn and ask him to stop at anything particularly interesting. “The students were mesmerized,” Seidel says.
Ackerman has retained that same sense of wonder. “When you work in ocean science, every day is interesting,” he says. “There hasn’t been a boring incident since I started 17 years ago. You never know what you will see. When we were doing biology work on the POINT LOBOS, probably once a month we could come across some new animal no one had seen before. The scientists would go, `What is that!’ We know more about the surface of Mars than about what goes on under the surface of our decks.”
Brian Ackerman can be reached at (207) 677-3064 or through his web site, www.bristolmarinesurvey.com.