‘Z-Boat’ expands access for hydro survey

Driving a boat trailer to the survey site requires a wide access point and a convenient place to launch the boat. The boat launch site may be miles from the actual survey location. In extreme cases, the survey boat may have to be delivered to the survey site from underneath a helicopter. For very shallow water there is the added problem of ensuring the boat draft is enough to reach all of the survey area and obtain the specified coverage.

To address these challenges, The Oceanscience Group of San Diego, California has recently launched the Z-Boat 1800 portable remotely operated survey boat that brings high quality positioning and depth sounder instruments together on a convenient remote platform that can be launched and operated from practically anywhere.

Early adopters of the Oceanscience system include surveyors from Shafer, Kline & Warren (SKW) of Kansas USA. The SKW team was faced with performing multiple cable route surveys in rivers with little or no access for a manned boat. For the relatively short river cross sections, mobilizing a conventional survey boat was an expensive proposition that would have made the job impossible to perform in a cost effective manner. Instead, the Z-Boat 1800 was deployed from the shore, between the fallen trees and logs.

Oceanscience designs and manufactures field data systems for hydrologists, hydrographers, and oceanographers. The company has been developing remote boats for nearly a decade and its Adrian McDonald said, “The Z-Boat is the latest in a line of high performance instrumentation boats. Previous Oceanscience remote boats were used almost exclusively for current profiling and river discharge measurements, adding the capability to perform high quality bathymetry was a natural progression for us and opens up a significant number of opportunities for us to make surveyors lives easier. “