This is obviously a somewhat dark-age system; we have no 

 communication to the surface and no telemetry. It leads to the 

 final desired system involving conducting cable moorings, data 

 storage, and radio telemetry from the surface. This is the goal 

 toward which we are working and may be considered an ultimate 

 system. As far as I know, only the work of Dr. Charles S. Cox 

 at Scripps Institution of Oceanography approaches this require- 

 ment. There have been very few buoys moored on a conducting 

 cable with information sensed at depth and transferred to the sur- 

 face. I understand that I. T. and T. will set some deep hydro- 

 phone buoys shortly, and we at Woods Hole will be setting some 

 current stations, probably later this winter, but really very little 

 has been accomplished. There nnay well be efforts in the Depart- 

 ment of Defense about which I do not know and there is also some 

 foreign effort. 



The title of my talk implied I was going to discuss the main- 

 tenance of such a system. Nobody knows very much about this. 

 Our own line has been in place for only about 3 or 4 months. We 

 are just beginning to see what the maintenance picture will be. 

 The first thing one encounters on setting a line of buoys out in 

 the ocean and driving away from them is they look very fragile, 

 lonely, and small. If you are normal, you worryl This is perhaps 

 one of the worst features of this type of experiment. We have 

 lost 4 out of 31 of the deep stations which we have set. In two of 

 these, the cause has been diagnosed as the mechanical failure 

 of a part of the instrument, not really a failure of the mooring 

 proper. For the other two the causes aire unknown, since not- 

 thing was recovered. 



We encounter marine fouling on these moorings at all depths, 

 although the species, of course, change. We do see some evid- 

 ence on our current meters (where we rely on rotating parts) of 

 difficulty with this facet of the environment. We have had con- 

 siderable corrosion on some parts of our instruments and pre- 

 sently have installed corrosion test panels in these moorings. 

 This data will be analyzed and available fairly soon. The rates 

 of corrosion in the deep water are appreciable as they are in 

 the shallow water, as you might expect; but for some materials 

 they appear to be different in deep water than in the shallow 

 water . 



I would like to finish by trying to convey some idea of the 

 economics of buoy operations as opposed to ship operations. This 



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