Beam Reach

Lead Beam Reach instructor Jason Wood makes a cameo appearance in this nice video put out a week ago by the Puget Sound Partnership.   Here he is wearing his Research Curator hat for The Whale Museum and pointing out the aesthetic value of the Salish Sea along with Kari Koski, Jenny Atkinson, and other local [...]

Garrison Bay to Roche Harbor
Today was a good day. We started calling other people in the whale network and found J pod by Lummi Island in Bellingham Channel. We made our way around the south side of San Juan and Lopez islands and finally found them. At 14:20:00 we started recording whale data for the [...]

Jones Island to Garrison Bay
We left Jones Island this morning and sailed through Speiden channel.  Because it was calm conditions we practiced doing actual jibes. Around one o’clock we picked up Val and Marla Holt at Snug Harbor. Marla will be on until Wednesday teaching us what she knows about sound and masking in the [...]

Today after our day at land we left Friday Harbor Labs to make our way to Port Angeles, with the hope of seeing the transients at Race Rocks and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We did not deploy anything besides the Gato Verde hydrophone for opportunistic listening, and throughout the day analyzed and localized [...]

We made the short passage to FHL in the morning and spent the rest of the day cleaning, reprovisioning, and relaxing.

The Earth Day mooring kept us secure all night. Our science goals today are to keep working on methods, practice using and deploying the sound devices and hydrophones, and hopefully encounter actual whales for recording data.We practiced using the acoustic fish tags and saw how far we could detect them off Lime Kiln. The furthest [...]

We left Snug with a series of science goals for the day. We headed south on the ebb tide towards Lime Kiln. On the way there and back we deployed the Biosonics 200 kHz echosounder for the first time. This marks our first forays into using active acoustics. We got so excited [...]

After an overview of passage planning (charts, currents, weather) from Todd, we practiced tacking and jibing in 10-12 kt winds, traveling NW between Spieden and Waldron Islands. The wind moderated in the early afternoon and we eventually motored into Prevost. At the dock the students each collected a series of mocked up data [...]

Co-Chief Science Officer’s log
Sea Date 10-1-06 (Day 13)
Heading back to sea is always a good way to start the month. We left the Friday Harbor labs at around 14:30 to head over to the Port of Friday Harbor to pump out our holding tanks before we hit the high seas. Captain Todd has [...]