MATATAUA ON ICE
MATATAUA ON ICE
T Gin Atkinson, L Operations Officer, HMNZS MATATAUA
“Hukapapa” translates to ‘ice’ or ‘frost’, and that is exactly what a team of Hydrographers and Divers from HMNZS MATATAUA encountered as they embarked on a long training exercise at Lake Alta in the Remarkables mountain range near Queenstown.
The aim for the week was to test our survey and underwater search equipment to see how the gear would react to an extreme cold weather environment. Lake Alta was the perfect location for this, being accessible from Queenstown, and having a thick layer of ice over a sufficiently deep lake. This is in preparation for a survey tasking at Scott Base, Antarctica, where the team hope to deploy later this year. A deployment to Antarctica would be a first for MATATAUA, so we called on the experts at Antarctica New Zealand to help us work in the cold environment, and to provide us with some extreme cold weather clothing – for which we were truly grateful! We also weren’t sure how REMUS, our Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), would react to working underneath a layer of surface ice, so we gave the Police Dive Squad a call to see if they would be interested in a combined training exercise. This would have the benefits of providing the opportunity for some ice dive training for them, as well as us having a helping hand nearby to recover the AUV if it decided to get temporarily misplaced under the ice.
Navy Today #248 | 21
