Beam Reach

Beam Reach begins – Week 1

G’Day. I’m Tim from Australia and this is the first blog entry I’ll be making for the Fall 2007 Beam Reach Program. I plan on posting one a week but of course it all depends on time and how busy this program gets. So, in saying that, here’s how the first week went down.

I arrived at the Friday Harbor Laboratories, Friday Harbor WA on Sunday August 19^th at around 6:30pm. I met a couple of other students on the ferry across from Anacortes so we went and grabbed dinner as we had missed dinner at the Dining Hall. Got to the labs a couple of hours later and made our way up to the dorms. Met some more Beam Reach students and settled into my room. I got a room to myself as I was going to be the only guy student on the program for the next 10 weeks. I don’t know what it is with women and marine science, particularly marine mammal science, but it clearly seems to be dominated by the female gender, in the
US I’ve found anyway, as this was the case when I studied at UMiami in Spring 2006.

So Monday morning we had breakfast together then headed off to class. Met Jason Wood and Val Veirs and we all gave little introductory spiels about ourselves. We all have different backgrounds, as can be expected, and it was interesting to hear what people have done/are doing with their university degrees. I’m one of two international students. The other is also a chick from Australia, Ash, from
Adelaide funnily enough, and also from my home uni. We get along great guns as we can really relate to each other being so far away from home and in a slightly different culture. I’ve been helping her with the subtleties of the American culture as I have spent 6 months living in the
US back 2006. So mid morning Mon we headed across to Lime Kiln State Park, a popular land whale-watching place on the west side of San Juan Island and got time to ourselves to think about what we wanted to do on this program and what area of study we wanted to focus on. I want to do something with boat noise and killer whale acoustics but have not yet decided specifically. Unfortunately no orcas in the area or on the OrcaSound (go to Orcasound.net to hear live streaming) hydrophone, guess I’ll have to wait for the boat.

The next few days consisted of Beam Reach Program introduction, basic acoustics tutorials, and finalising the area of study to write our draft proposals. On the Wednesday night we went into
Friday Harbor to the Whale Museum and listened to a presentation on Southern Resident killer whale communication and the changes that have been observed in the last 25 years. It was very interesting, even more so the fact that it was done by a senior undergraduate student. We were also allocated our groups for the boats this evening.Friday saw the swim test. Many of the crew had been dreading this but it actually turned out to be a lot of fun. Don’t get me wrong the water was bloody cold but the sun was out so once you got out of the water you were fine. Jumping off the dock was a good laugh and many a photo was taken. Just before the swim test we did a small experiment that used a hydrophone to measure sound propagated from underwater speaker at varying distances. It basically helped us to understand the sound propagates in a spherical manner underwater. In the afternoon we planned the food for our voyage out at sea, and then a few of us decided to row into town to meet the others to go shopping. I just love the fact that we can row into town and it’s actually quicker than walking.

Saturday was our day off and most of us slept in and missed 8am breakfast so basically the rest of the day was spent doing our proposals and getting ready for the boat the next day as some of us had to move rooms. Luckily I didn’t have to move anything as my room was one of the ones we were keeping. Mind you, I don’t have much stuff to move but the same can’t be said for other people in the group. They know who they are, and I’ve been giving them heaps all week!

Sunday we loaded all the gear, food and personal stuff we needed for our week on the boat onto the dock and awaited the arrival of the ‘Gato Verde’ catamaran. Todd (captain) and Shannon (other BR instructor) arrived just before lunch so we all had a perusal of the vessel we would all be calling home over the next 9 weeks. So we had lunch, loaded all the gear up, I shotgun my little hidey hole at the forward starboard, we said our goodbyes to the land group, and off we sailed, well motored as there was no wind, to our place of mooring for the first night.

So as I write this at the end of the first week at Beam Reach I’m sitting out on the ‘Gato Verde’ cabin area where we are moored at the southern end of Jones Island (NE of San Juan Island). I can see the moon in the sky peaking through the clouds over San Juan Island and it’s glistening on the ripples of the water. I can hear the waves lightly breaking on the rocks nearby and the sounds of crickets on the island. Yep, doesn’t get much better than this. ‘Tis gonna be a good week I feel.