Excursion to Fort Manoel

Today the team split up in two for the morning. Ian, Andrew, Spencer, and I took a drive over to Fort Manoel to deploy the ROV into some cisterns while the others went to St. Edwards school for outreach. When we arrived at Fort Manoel, we met up with our host and the island curator, who greeted us and allowed us to set up equipment while explaining a little about the island's history.

Fort Manoel was one of the three point defenses established by the knights of St. John to defend the capitol city of Valletta. Needless to say, the fort was pretty cool, and we were very lucky to be able to be on site seeing as access is usually exclusive.

We first deployed the ROV into a small cistern in the wall. Here is a glamorous shot of our photogenic ROV during this ordeal.

Later on we had some time to explore the site, so we wandered around. Fort Manoel was my favorite site visit so far. There were incredible views every direction we looked.

 The rest of the group returned from outreach at around 1:00PM, at which time we deployed into a second cistern for mapping. The wind was fierce atop the fort, and we were all freezing as we collected our data.

Once we were finished, we wandered around for a while longer in order to take pictures.




We will soon be processing the data from our site visits today, but for now I'm headed off to bed to get some rest before we go to Valletta tomorrow!