A wee quiz with no prize and at the moment no answers. On the SS Explorer sometimes things turn up and sometimes they disappear. The brass devices pictured recently appeared. I don’t know where from and having been volunteering on the ship for ten years and been over every inch of her I should have seen them before.
The question is, what are they?
The smaller one above is a bout six inches long and has a spring loaded latch which retains the brass ring.
The larger one above is around 12 inches long and again has a spring retained latch. At the top is a small spring loaded pin with a ring to grip it by. A third of the way down is a thumbscrew which doesn’t seem to retain anything. The large brass section below that swings from the bolt and is restricted from full rotation by the boss which retains the thumbscrew.
They are vertical plankton net releases. They would be mounted on the hydro wire and the plankton net , usually with three tow bridles and a metal ring to keep it open would be put into the bottom part of the device once it was cocked. The throttling rope would be put on to the side part of the device , so that when a brass messenger was sent down the wire when the net had finished sampling at the required depth, it released the bridles and the weight of the ring fell over causing the throttling rope to tighten stopping any other organisms getting in to the net while it was being hauled to the surface.
Thank you John. I suspected if anyone knew it would be you. Would that be related to the sampling bottles?