Internship Report by Deborah Baker

Our beach anchor test with the anchor camera bracket prototype which Trek aptly nicknamed “The Big Cheese”

Over the summer of 2025/2026 I have had the privilege of completing an internship at AusOcean. I am a current Mechanical Engineering student, heading into my third year of study and over the past couple of years I have heard many internship horror stories of students stuck sitting at desks and inputting menial data into Excel spreadsheets. I thought I would likely be heading for the same unfortunate internship experience until I stumbled upon a post in the Overheard at the University of Adelaide Facebook group advertising the AusOcean summer internship program. I don’t think I had ever been excited while reading a job description and perusing a company’s website before; but I was certainly thrilled to learn about the work that happens at AusOcean and the part that I might be able to play in supporting our oceans here in South Australia. About a year after initially hearing about AusOcean, I applied for and was successful at securing a spot as an intern here. Three months later I can confidently say that it has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life so far.

I made the commute south to the humble AusOcean home-base, a shed that has been converted into an office and workshop on the 1st of December last year. After meeting my fellow engineers and the other intern I was given a few big problems to solve, including designing a new sea-floor camera system and fixing the leaky mast-seal. Instead of being tasked with the simple work which the qualified engineers didn’t want to do, I was given a project that the team was yet to solve. I felt both excited and a little out-of-my-depth as I heard about my tasks and started brainstorming ideas about the sea-floor camera system with Trek and David, the AusOcean engineers.

In early 2025, a harmful algal bloom (HAB) began across South Australia which has had a huge impact on the marine environment here. This HAB, and the unknowns it brought, forced the AusOcean team to make some swift decisions around their technology and operations, including moving away from scuba-diving based deployments. Previously, the AusOcean research platform, known as the Rig, had been deployed using screwpiles which are installed by divers on the seafloor. This meant that a sea-floor camera would need to be placed at the screwpile and installed while on scuba. Without divers in the water on deployments, AusOcean didn’t have a method for installing a seafloor camera.

After throwing around ideas with the team, I suggested we try mounting the camera on the new anchors which we are using for the rigs. It was a simple solution which certainly didn’t promise a great viewing experience, but we figured we may as well give it a shot. I began designing and prototyping different brackets to mount the camera to the anchor. Once I had completed a design which we were happy with, we took the anchor to the beach to test that the camera angles worked well enough to deploy. The test was thankfully successful, and so I sourced some steel and prepared some new brackets ready to install on the Glenelg reef restoration rig.

After preparing the anchor camera for deployment, and helping to prepare the Glenelg rig the AusOcean team set out to deploy the new Glenelg rig. It would be anchored next to the Glenelg Oyster Reef to help support reef restoration after the HAB. It was a beautiful, albeit sweaty, day out on the water as we deployed Glenelg and then went for a snorkel. I felt incredibly satisfied that I’d seen a small project go from start to finish, and especially excited when checking the Glenelg reef livestream, knowing that the brackets which I made were holding the camera.

Deploying the Glenelg rig on the 18th of December

An ornate cowfish we spotted on the Glenelg reef cam

Once the Glenelg rig was deployed, I started on my next project - analysing the stability of the rig. The current rig design has some stability issues in bad weather, and so we were working to figure out how to improve its stability - but first we needed to model it. This was much more like the mechanical engineering study which I had been doing, although I still had a lot to learn. I worked alongside Saxon, who helped me to set up a spreadsheet to generate the righting arm curve of the rig which helps us to understand its behaviour when tilted at different angles. Through this analysis we gained a much more thorough understanding of our rig behaviour, and can better problem-solve the stability issues in future designs. This process was a really cool learning opportunity for me, where I got to gather and apply my engineering knowledge to a real-world project which can help inform design choices in the future. I feel particularly privileged to have been able to make a meaningful contribution to AusOcean’s engineering using the skills I’ve learnt at uni so far.

About six weeks after the Glenelg deployment, I went to check out the livestream and see if there were any fish around, and the stream had ended a few hours early. Upon further investigation we discovered that the rig had completely stopped functioning and was no longer reporting. We planned a maintenance trip to find out what had happened, thinking it was likely a manufacturing fault and that we would hopefully be able to fix it while out on the trusty AusOcean boat Dave. Now normally you can spot the Glenelg rig from along the beach, but Cath realised that she couldn’t see it at all and so we rushed to get out to recover the rig. When approaching in the boat we realised that another vessel must have struck the rig and smashed both pontoons, and it was barely floating.

That’s not what the rig is supposed to look like… Glenelg recovery on the 6th of February

As we pulled the rig up onto the boat, we realised that both solar panels were shattered, and one sensor arm (with a speaker and camera on it) was completely missing. This boat must have hit it really hard to cause that much damage. We recovered the rig, pulled up anchor and headed back to dismantle and salvage whatever we could from this mangled rig.

The Glenelg rig had certainly seen better days 6th Jan

With the ups and downs of deployments and recovery trips it was encouraging to see the persistence and focus of the rest of the AusOcean team. Despite the new and frustrating obstacles we were faced with, we persevered and were fixed on our goal to do our part to help our oceans here in Australia. With the goals in mind, we set out to prepare two new rigs to deploy, one at Glenelg to continue the reef restoration project, and the other to go to Port Noarlunga to help build up the streams on AusOceanTV. I worked closely with David as we ticked off the many tasks required to prepare these rigs for deployment. It was many long days spent inside the workshop, which unfortunately lacks an aircon, but after about two weeks we had two fresh rigs ready to launch. In the last week of my full time internship, we had a great weather window for deployment so we spent Thursday and Friday out on the boat putting the rigs at Glenelg and Port Noarlunga. It felt like such an incredible ending to what had been both a challenging and exciting three months of work.

As my internship wraps up, I am particularly grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the AusOcean team over the last three months. I have grown significantly in my engineering skills, and feel privileged to have been part of the conservation work which AusOcean undertakes. I think I’ll hold the record for having the coolest engineering internship!