Sometimes, it's easy to overthink things. The first dive was unfortunately a victim of such folly....

The Sitkinak does not have any Dynamic Positioning capabilities and is engineered to idle at 9 knots. This presents a challenge for the coxswain to hold station over the dive site. It was decided to face the Sitkinak into the wind and "punch" the throttle only as much as needed to maintain heading and position. It was assumed that this meant the Sitkinak would slowly creep forward, so the starting point would be downwind of the dive site. With that in mind, the tether length was kept to a minimum and the plan was to deploy the Defender downwind of the site with the hope that it could be maneuvered over the site as it followed (or was pulled by) the Sitkinak into the wind.

This strategy ended when the Defender could not dive below about 650 feet and never made it to the bottom. There were a few flashes of the bottom on sonar, but only briefly and not enough to conduct a reasonable search.

In the meantime the Sitkinak got a little sideways to the wind and ended up drifting South of the site. The caused the tether to go under the stern and towards the port side. Fearing the worst for the tether, the screws were kept still and the ship went dead in the water. To make matters worse, this orientation and the wind's direction funneled the ship's exhaust directly towards the ROV operation station. With the ship broadside to the wind and seas, the roll increased significantly requiring someone to hold the control panel in place. Fortunately there were enough hands on deck that people could rotate out briefly to get fresh air.

The only option at this point was to recover the Defender and regroup for another attempt.