Here is a great video put together by the spring 2010 students. It is a half-hour fantastic eye candy and an elegant visual tour of the 10-week program. Check out the still photos and video of springtime coming to the San Juan Islands, transient killer whale encounters, a sailboat race, life at sea, rope craft, the southern residents from Ken Balcomb’s boat, data collection, breaching professors, and more. Thanks to Libby, Nora, Horace, and Kathryn for putting it together!
This is the best way to summarize our 10 week adventure. Enjoy!
The beautiful sun was shining and the tides were cooperative today for a lovely day on the water. Unfortunately, the whales did not agree and stayed away from the Strait (and everywhere in the Northern inland waters) again today. I am crossing my fingers that they make an exciting appearance tomorrow morning directly off our bow sprit. Other animals seemed to enjoy the day, and we were able to watch a number of porpoises play in turbulent waters just off Turn point, some harbor seals napping at high tide on a reef too flooded to be relaxing, and various birds surrounding us all day. We watched cormorants eat skinny silver fish (and thought in awe of the research that gathers data on the species that a bird eats) and seagulls noisily chase each other down while the rhinocerous auklets were focused on diving to the depths. The group had great discussions about the complicated methods in behavioral science and hashed out details for when the whales arrive. With our hearts full of laughter and sunshine, we set off to Wescott Bay to watch the harbor seals play and listen to the orchestra of birds just off our bow. And of course, to fill up on fried rice.
The weather today started out cold but became very nice. We tried to pump out at the barge in Reid Harbor, but it wasn’t working so we decided to go to Roche Harbor instead. Before we left, Jason got on the dingy and fed the plug end of the single hydrophone up through the drain for the recycling area so we have an easy deployment of a hydrophone. At Roche we pumped put, filled the propane tank and bought milk, and then were on our way. We drifted down the west side of San Juan Island till about 4:00 when we turned around so we sould make it back to Snug in a reasonable time. While we were drifting we decided to re-try the lightbulb implosion experiment and had much more sucess this time. There were no waves or dodging ships. The 100m test went of beautifuly. The imploding light bulbs made a great sound, kind of like a gunshot. The first snag came on the next test at 200m. The recorders heard 6 sounds and stopped the recording but two of the sounds were taps where the smasher got stuck on the lightbulbs and shortly after stopping the recording we heard a great implosion. The next test was another at 200m and this one set the tone for the rest. It didn’t go as well but good data came from it. All three tests at 400m had problems, but between the three there was usable data. After we pulled up we headed back to Snug Harbor for the night.
Finally the winds died down enough for us to venture forth into Haro Strait again to look for whales and conduct other research. We enjoyed some breezes in the morning and rode the flood time up to Turn Point on Stuart Island where we positioned ourselves to watch and listen for killer whales. Val came aboard this morning in Snug Harbor which allowed us to have mentor meetings with both Val and Jason and all to iron out some more of the wrinkles in research methods. Science always makes its best progress when multiple minds focus on a problem and discuss the matter at hand. During the day we were graced with sightings of a number of porpoises, including two different sightings of around 3 Dall’s porpoise in the area of Turn Point. This was a real treat as we have not seen many in these waters during the last several years. After a wonderful dinner at the dock in Reid Harbor we revisited our calibration exercise to make sure we all understood the process and decide which the most appropriate calibration factors to use were. Nothing like an invigorating discussion of logarithmic decibel scales around the lounge of the Gato Verde to end off the day.
We bunkered down in snug harbor today and didn’t even bother to stick our noses out into the Strait. The small craft advisory and warnings of gusts up to 60 mph kept us away and content today. The sun was shining although the wind was blowing, and we were able to avoid all sea-sickness by avoiding everything other than our lovely harbor. We discussed various methods of taking data and send Jason out in La Gatita to pretend to be whales behaving in several manners while we took recordings.It was quite entertaining to see the dingy bouncing around in the harbor and catching enough wind to almost send Jason into the brisk water. Luckily, he made it back just in time to start dinner. Being the responsible one on board, he was sure to serve broccoli, beets, and polenta-lasagna. Oh, we did spot a harbor seal taking a few breaths and resting at the surface just a few meters from the bow. So there’s the reported science from the day. Other than that, we worked on papers and read several scientific articles between the five of us. I think that if you combined all of the knowledge that our brains host, you could form a small acoustic and marine mammal behavioral library.
We headed out towards the south side of the island in hopes of finding J pod. Not much wildlife sightings today, other than some seagulls. No updates on the phone or email on sightings of J pod either, which was sad for us to hear. We had a general prediction that since they finally came back into the area, they are still looking for the fish to eat. It is like moving back home after college life in the dormitories: the whales have to resettle into the area. We anchored at Mackeye Harbor on Lopez Island to have a quick lunch consisting of grilled cheese sandwiches. At Mackeye, we finished our calibration exercise using the data that we got from the hydrophone calibration yesterday. Afterwards, we headed back up to Mitchell Bay, spotting about 3 seals (unidentified) poking their heads out of the waters. At Mitchell (Snug Harbor), we then enjoyed at nice dinner cooked up by Jason and Nora: chile. Then moved on towards journal club to finish off the night.
Since J Pod is back in town, our main goal today was to find the whales. We started drifting down the west side of San Juan Island hoping we’d find them in Haro Strait. Around 10 am, several Dall’s porpoises surfaced off of Gato Verde’s stern. Recently, Dall’s sightings have been few and far between, so it was very exciting to see them! Once we had passed Lime Kiln Point State Park without any whale sightings, we decided to calibrate our hydrophones (the array, the “blue box,” and the flat-frequency hydrophone). We rigged them up side by side and lowered them 5 meters below the surface. We made several successful recordings. Later in the afternoon, we decided to try to search for the south hydrophone array with the Splashcam. Unfortunately we had technical difficulties and had to abort our mission, but Jason solved the problem and we will likely try to deploy the Splashcam again soon. After a morning and afternoon of no whales, we made the executive decision to start working our way back up the west side to find someplace to anchor for the night. The Southern residents seem to be swimming clockwise around the San Juan Islands, and we are hoping they’ll loop back around to Haro Strait tomorrow.
We started today with the intention of finding the orcas. Once we made it out into Haro Strait we realized that the winds were very strong and that even if we found the orcas it would be very challenging to deploy the hydrophones. We made amazing time riding the tides and sailing at about 10 knots over ground, so we decided to circumnavigate San Juan Island. We got a lot of sailing in and made it up to Stuart Island around 4:30 and had a sailing lecture before finding out that J pod had been spotted heading north at Lime Kiln 1.5 hours prior. We decided to go out to the point to see if we could spot them as they passed by. We went out and at the tip of Turn Point there was a line of white water. It was the convergence zone of the upwellings caused by the tides moving over the rocks near the point. There was a mass of gulls all feeding in the upwellings. We went a bit further and saw some orcas. It was very exciting! We didn’t ID them because they were too far away and they weren’t on the surface in any predictable pattern. We thought that they were foraging so the direction they were moving was hard to tell, but we thought they were moving north.
