The shifts on board the ship are punishing: 12 hours on, 12 hours off, seven days a week, for a month straight though pingpong and poker during the downtime help break up the monotony.
But for the American man who designed a sonar device being used in the hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, spending nearly six months at sea searching for the plane was something of an honor.
With that honor has come the weight of responsibility for the families of the 239 people on board the vanished plane still desperate for answers. Now, with the search of a remote patch of ocean off Australia's west coast drawing to a close and the plane's wreckage proving stubbornly elusive, Jay Larsen is among those feeling the pressure.
"I think there is some tension building as the end of the job comes nearer," says Larsen, whose Whitefish, Montana-based company built one of the devices scanning a mountainous stretch of seabed where the plane is believed to have crashed nearly two years ago. "Everybody wants to find this thing, including us."
Larsen has been involved with the hunt from the beginning, when marine services contractor Phoenix International Holdings hired his deep-water search and survey company, Hydrospheric Solutions, to provide the sonar equipment used on board the search vessel GO Phoenix. The Malaysian-contracted vessel participated in eight months of the hunt until June last year.
Most recently, Larsen and his team flew to Singapore to load their sonar device onto a Chinese ship, the Dong Hai Jiu 101, which has just joined three other vessels scouring the southern Indian Ocean for the plane. He then traveled on board the Dong Hai to the west Australian city of Fremantle, and, after ensuring the sonar and his team were ready to go, bid them adieu last month as they set out for the search zone 1,800 kilometers to the southwest.
Larsen's company has a crew of eight people on the Chinese ship who are tasked with running the sonar system or "flying the fish," as he puts it. That "fish" is actually a 6-metre long, 1.5-metre wide, 3.5-ton bright yellow behemoth called the SLH ProSAS-60, which is dragged slowly behind the ship by a cable.
The device hovers just above the seabed as it scans a patch of ocean floor 2 kilometers wide, sending data to computers on board that process the information into images.
The black-and-white, near-photo-quality pictures that pop up on the screen resemble the surface of the moon.
The imagery, produced by synthetic aperture sonar, is higher quality than conventional sonar, Larsen says, giving him confidence that his team won't miss the debris field if they drift over it.
