So this was a BIG one, and it’s gonna take a couple of posts to get through. Last spring I was scheduled to work the 2018 solar eclipse livestream from the great smokey mountains. It was gonna be pretty cool to film and produce a show about the eclipse from up in the mountains, even if a bit challenging. But we had the budget for a satellite truck to make up for our lack of internet access and half a dozen people working on it so all was looking good. Then I got a call asking me to head down to Charleston to look at a boat!
It turns out we had partnered with the College of Charleston to livestream a ballon experiment they where going to release off shore during the eclipse and they needed me to head down and scout it out. And that was about as much as we knew. No idea of boat size but anything up to a cutter was possible and by the initial description of the event that seemed like what were where getting. Which for our purposes was best. More room, possible land communications connections and maybe even internet I thought. Oh how silly I was.
When I arrived at the Coast Guard station I was taken out to see a 48 foot rescue boat. Now don’t get me wrong, this thing was cool! It’s basically a jet-ski on steroids. Buuuuut it’s a bit small for a film crew, student scientist, teachers, a few press, and the normal coast guard crew to say the least. “Worry about that latter I thought” since for now we where heading out to conduct some basic tests on the equipment the kids would be using. This gave me a great chance to meet everyone involved, see what we would be actually filming and get some sort of idea what we could do from this boat. Turns out we would be going at least 6 miles offshore, there was no internet (of course) and we would have no access to the onboard communications. So this was gonna be one livestream challenge!
This was gonna be a lot of work, but I did get to have a great day out on the water though.