Inspection of IMTA pilot at North Sea Innovation Lab
2020-03-26
On the 16th of March we visited our offshore pilot for the IMPAQT project on the North Sea Innovation Lab. The purpose of this visit was the inspection of all the deployed installations and to perform maintenance on the measurement buoy. We were happy to see that all installations - the seaweed module, the measurement buoy and the mussel module were all still in their original positions after the recent storms Ciara and Dennis. Quite a relief and achievement!
Unfortunately we did observe some damage on the seaweed module on the growing frames. We are not yet sure what could have been the cause for this so this is still under scrutiny. However, it is clear that we need to repair this damage as soon as possible not to jeopardise the seaweed production. So, as soon as the weather conditions are right, we will repair the structure. This will probably be somewhere next week. During our visit we also made underwater recordings in order to see how the seaweed is growing. These recordings show us that on both the sawtooth cultivation system (2d-vertical long lines) and the net cultivation system the seaweed is growing well. The length is estimated to vary between 5cm and 30cm which is quite good for Saccharina seaweed direct seeded in November 2019. The mussel module is completely intact as it should be and it seems to attract a lot of small seabirds, mainly terns.
Ivo, our freelance technician from Aqitec, performed maintenance on the electronics equipment of our NSIL Data Buoy as well as some minor failures. Together with our partners EGM and KPN, we discovered these issue so that very soon we will have our AIS signal back as well as a fully functional LORA network on the NSIL. We will keep you posted!
