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Our strength is our ability to offer systems and solutions that work. Not just in theory or in the lab in the hands of specialists, but in the real world, in your hands, under the conditions that you and your team face every day.

With years of field experience, often operating far from shore and away from external support, we have learned the value of rugged, resilient equipment and antifragile systems. We also know that a system is operated and maintained by people who are acting in a mix of environmental factors, ranging from weather and sea conditions to their own culture and the culture of their surroundings. Having worked on projects in four oceans and more than 50 countries:

we have seen the pitfalls that can cripple a system, even a system that has been used with a high level of success in other circumstances. For us, the learning process never stops. We watch the development community for new materials, products and techniques, and the academic world continues to build insights about the constituents of good design.

And then there are the bad days that provide some of our most expensive and most memorable lessons:

Two-man launch team and SSI Sys100 survey towfish during

summer in the Bahamas. (photo by Paul Jubinski, Fugro

Seafloor Surveys)

Four-man recovery team and SSI Sys100 survey

towfish during autumn in the North Pacific. (photo by

Fris Campbell, Seafloor Surveys International)

It’s a bad day when you discover that the 5-pin underwater connector on one of your primary instrument components now has only 4 1/2 pins. It becomes a worse day when you find that the space behind the connector is full of hard potting material, meaning that the connector can only be replaced at the factory, which is an ocean away. (photo by Paul Jubinski, Teledyne Reson)

It’s a bad day when it becomes clear that the pump-house serving the drydock complex does not have the capacity to meet all of the facility’s needs simultaneously. Yesterday, your ship was in a drydock. Today it is sitting over a foot-deep wading pool. (photo by Paul Jubinski, Reson)

It’s a bad day when the topographic relief in the area that you are surveying has upslopes that exceed the assumptions used in the design of your autonomous vehicle’s bottom-following algorithm. (photo by Paul Jubinski, Reson)

It’s a bad day when the drydock master pumps the water out of the drydock before confirming that your vessel has been positioned so that all of the instruments installed on the hull of your vessel are between the support blocks. (photo by Paul Jubnski, Teledyne Reson)

It’s a bad day when the deterioration in the performance of your hull- mounted sonar is explained by a missing cover panel, whose absence has allowed many of the array cables to fall downward, trail in the water below the ship and be cut through by chafing. (photo by Paul Jubinski, Reson)

It’s a bad day when you have a towfish, a depressor weight and 5,000 meters of armored towcable in the water and your spooler winch goes on holiday while the traction winch is hauling in towcable. With one side of the traction winch under high tension and the other side a tangle of slack cable loops, the situation presents a problem that is not for the faint of heart. (photo by Paul Jubinski, Jubinski TEKADE)

It’s a bad day when the sonar array attached to the hull of your ship is deeper than the shallowest part of the submerged wreck that you are transiting over. One minute you have a matched set of acoustic transducers worth a good portion of a million dollars and the next minute you have a couple of pallets of material to send to the dump. (photo by Paul Jubinski, Teledyne Reson)

It’s a bad day when you must cut your cruise short after the mate on the bridge demonstrates that he does not fully understand the right-of-way rules for inland waterways. (photo by Paul Jubinski, Reson)

Sometimes a survey job comes along that provides some perspective regarding our “bad days”. All in all, a “bad day” can’t be that bad if, when its over, you still get to go home to people you love. (photo by Paul Jubinski, Reson)

It’s a bad day when someone loses control of an acoustic tracking pole, allows it to free-fall through the hull fitting located between the ship’s main engines and creates a fountain in the middle of the engine room. If the flooding can’t be controlled, the result is inevitable. (photos by Paul Jubinski, Fugro Seafloor Surveys)