[This post is back-dated to July 31st, 2014, which is the date that the station communications came to an end.]
Citing the relatively little amounts of data produced by its participation in the Lao Lao Bay CREWS station project, PacIOOS decided in March that they would withdraw from this collaboration with CHAMP (based out of AOML in Miami) and BECQ (the CNMI governmental agency created out of a merger between former agencies DEQ and CRM). This scarcity of data was the result of two extended station power outages (one from October 2011 to March 2012 caused by a blown fuse in the station's control package, and one from August 2012 to April 2013 caused by a damaged plug on the PacIOOS CTD) and the eight-month delay in reinstalling the PacIOOS CTD after its removal in August of 2013. Note that the station has remained online and fully functional, apart from the missing PacIOOS CTD, in the period from April 2013 through to the present, July 2014.
On June 30th, 2014, PacIOOS notified CHAMP in Miami that they were planning to close the cellular account associated with this station's modem. CHAMP and BECQ began talking about the future of the station, whether it could in fact be maintained as needed (given that in the prior year only three of the expected twelve monthly visits could be performed by BECQ), and who would assume responsibility for the cellular account costs formerly covered by PacIOOS, as well as the costs of purchasing new sensors and recalibrating old sensors on the occasion of the station's next annual equipment swapout (which came due in May 2014).
However, these discussions have yet to produce a clear plan for the station's future, and PacIOOS was facing a hard deadline for eliminating the monthly costs of the station's cellular account. Without any one player identified as able and willing to accept transfer of PacIOOS' cellular account (which was the one option that might have kept the station's communications uninterrupted), PacIOOS were forced to simply close the account as of July 31st, 2014.
The last data update from this station was received at 2014-07-31 11:31:05 UTC. The station is expected to continue normal operations but its data cannot be accessed except by manual means, either by connecting to the logger by radio from a laptop in the station's near vicinity, or by physically removing the logger and extracting the flash memory card from it. Given that the station is now operating "in the dark" as it were, it is possible that it may be experiencing instrument failures or even power failures so we cannot currently be certain that it is operating at all.