Beam Reach

Update on Science blogs from the Gato Verde

During this first week of our time aboard the Gato Verde we have been getting accustomed to life aboard, running the boat systems and working with our research methods and equipment. As part of doing our research we are getting in the habit of taking notes about where we have been and what we have done so that we have a log to go back to in the future as we start analyzing our data. In order to have a backup of that data and to share our daily experiences with you, we have been posting those science logs as blogs. To make it easier I have been uploading them as we have internet connection, but the reality is that we have all been taking turns writing the science log. So although it shows my name on the blog, in reality it is usually one of the students who have written the daily log. So that you know who wrote each log we will put their initials at the end of the blog.

We hope you enjoy following along with the research experience!

Boat Life

Despite the amount of build-up, preparation and thought that went into our departure, I’ve come to find that I had very few concretely formed expectations regarding boat life. I now believe that even if I had formed expectations, they would have been thoroughly altered after the first two hours.

So many small things in life need to change to make life on a boat possible. At home, my mixed family live in a strangely laid-out mother and law house. My mom and I joke by calling our part of the house, the ‘Paris apartment’ because it is so small and compact. The concepts required for peaceful cohabitation in the ‘Paris apartment’ must be multiplied tenfold to be acceptable on the Gato Verde.

One of the first rules of a small space is keeping it clean and uncluttered, particularly in communal spaces like kitchens and bathrooms. At home that meant leaving my school books In a tucked away corner of the living room, vacuuming at least twice a week, and always, always neatening my room once day. Here, it means cleaning every communal area at least once a day, never leaving your personal belongings in a communal area and living out of a backpack.

Val, Hannah and Peter getting some work done in our main communal quarters

We get up in the morning and the first thing after breakfast is completing our chore rotation. The breakfast dishes have to be washed, the systems and holding tanks for water sewage and fuel checked, the deck squeegeed and wiped, the galley cleaned, the floors swept and the weather and currents for the day reported on.

In chemistry, the term limiting reagent refers to the substance which determines how much of the reactants can completely turn into products. On the Gato Verde, the limiting reagent which determines whether or not we can keep sailing during the day is black water. I’m not, of course, talking about the erstwhile security contractor but about sewage which is what drives us to a fully functioning harbor more often than freshwater, food, or fuel.

Depending on your frame of reference, the Gato Verde can be accurately described as palatial or miniscule. I tend to try to classify it another way. Emotionally, the space is miniscule. Physically, the space is palatial for a boat. It’s trying to live in a place where everyone knows where everyone is and what they are doing every moment of every day. There just aren’t very many places to hide and have alone time on a boat.

All of that said, however, the experience has been incredible. The ability to travel over water, close to it, powered by it and living in it is an absolutely awe-inspiring one and something I have never been able to experience the same way. From a research perspective, it is an amazing opportunity. We tie up every night in beautiful secluded places and breathe clean, cool air, smiling into the wind, as we drift among islands covered in trees. We’ve watched otters, bald eagles, buffleheads, cormorants, harbor seals, transient orcas, Dall’s and harbor porpoises, and elephant seals all while learning loads and laughing.

Who could ask for more? It’s just that lovely.

North to Stuart Island

Mitchell Bay, SJI to Prevost Harbor, Stuart Island.
After stopping at Roche Harbor for lunch and switching captains, we began sailing towards Stuart Island.  At 14:00 we deployed the CRT hydrophone. The cable for the hydrophone was very sensitive causing interference and picked up a lot of flow noise.  At 14:30, the hydrophone array was deployed.
There was still some flow noise interference, but it was much better than the CRT.  As we reeled in the hydrophone array at 14:50, a group of Dall’s porpoises swam alongside the Gato Verde.  There were 5-6 which included a hybrid with a Harbor porpoise.  They were seen at latitude 48 deg. 43.08 min. N and  longitude 123 deg.14.90 min. W.

students watching Dall's porpoise ride bow wake

While the Dal’s porpoises were riding around our boat, a male elephant seal poked his head above the water for a minute.

Dall's Porpoises Party with the Gato Verde

Just two days after having our first encounter with the transient killer whales, another marine mammal drew our attention.  We were practicing deploying the linear array of hydrophones and comparing the differences between it and a single hydrophone in the afternoon of Wednesday April 22nd.  As Peter was reeling in the array, a group of 5-6 Dall’s porpoises began swimming in the wake created by the bow of the Gato Verde.  They swam with us for a good ten minutes, easily surpassing the boat just to fall back underneath again.  Everyone ran to the bow of the boat and sat on the trampoline (net) between the two hulls of the boat.  There were a few times that the porpoises surfaced under the trampoline seemingly to get everyone to scream in startlement.

Having fun swimming with our boat.

There was one porpoise that was determined to be a hybrid between the Dall’s porpoise and the Harbor porpoise.  The animal was gray and white instead of the custom black and white of the Dall’s porpoise.  The hybridization between the two species of porpoises always seems to occur with a male Harbor porpoise and a female Dall’s porpoise.  The offspring is always seen with the Dall’s porpoises because the mother raises the young.

These animals are being massively hunted in the Pacific Ocean by Japan.  When the International Whaling Committee banned commercial whaling, fisherman began focusing their attention on the Dall’s porpoise.  More information about this animal can be learned at http://dallsporpoise.org/, and what you can do to help their plight.

Sailing between fog banks

Snug Harbor to Snug Harbor

There was a heavy fog all morning. Students went over data sheets and thought about how easy it would be to run statistical tests on data collected and how easy it would be to turn into an excel spreadsheet.
We also made a list of science goals. Analyzing our data sheets were at the top of the list followed by behavior recognition improvement, ID the whales from yesterday, practice hydrophone deployment, read the journal article for journal club and possibly deploy the Vemco acoustic tag receiver.
At around noon the fog finally cleared out and we had a quick lesson on sailing and how the boat moves using the wind and then we went out to practice.
After sailing in about 20 knot winds for an hour or two we came back to Mitchell Bay. We continued our sailing lesson and went over terminology and ended the day with learning how to tie knots.
In the evening we read the journal article for our journal club discussion and tried to identify the transients we saw yesterday. We positively identified T40 but could only identify one female, T37b.
We need an updated transient ID guide because the guide only has photos of the left side of the saddle patch and most of our pictures were of the right side.
EB

A Welcomed Surprise

Watching transients under sail (credit: Jeanne Hyde)

Today my classmates and I were heading into Mitchell Bay after our first full day at sea when our Captain, Todd Shuster, noticed a collection of whale watching boats off in the distance. We took the opportunity to turn around and were rewarded by seeing a group of transient killer whales by Sidney Island. There was one male orca, which we later identified as T40, with four females or juveniles. We have not identified the other four whales yet. Males are typically easier to identify because they have larger dorsal fins, but T40 is especially easy to pick out because the tip of his dorsal fin is bent over.

It was a very exciting hour watching the whales and the boats around them. A few times the whales took a view of the world above them by spy hopping and jumped into the air a couple of times as well. After the initial exhilaration, we began to confer about the behavioral state of the whales. We were unable to deploy the hydrophones in time to record any sounds. It was a good learning experience to enable us to be more proficient in organizing equipment so that next time we come across whales we will be able to record all forms of data.  I feel fortunate that on our first full day at sea we came across orcas.

Spyhopping

There are many more comments and pictures about sightings of this group of whales at orcanetwork.org.

 

 

 

Transient killer whales on our first day

Jones Island to whales to Snug Harbor

Students raised the main sail for the first time on the Green Gato, and we sailed slowly from Jones Island to the beginning of Spieden channel. There the wind died, so we started motoring to Roche Harbor, where Val sped off to shore in the dinghy. We continued motoring towards Mitchell Bay and caught the wind for a while. When Todd noticed a little cluster of whale watching boats in Canada, we motored over to check it out. There they were — orcas — on the first full day at sea! Wahoo!

The whales we encountered were transients (the male T40 with four females) and they were frolicking and porpoising with glee. We stayed with them for about an hour, recording behavior and boat numbers. They started traveling north and we lost ’em. We motored back to Mitchell Bay, deploying the hydrophone as a demo on the way. We moored in the sunshine for an evening of swimming, burritos, and Grimm fairytales. -hmm.

The spring class embarks!

FHL to Jones Island

OK, we didn’t discover giant squid, but the students did get a chance at the helm of the Gato Verde.  The students were very efficient in moving all of the gear and food out of S1 and onto the Gato Verde so that we made a good start from FHL.  We even got a chance to see Anne Harmon one of our students from 2007 on the dock at FHL.  She is now working for Kwiaht, the Center for Historical Ecology of the Salish Sea.  The journey was a smooth one under partly cloudy skies.  Transited under electric power and tied up easily to the mooring bouy on the south end of Jones.

Fish hydrophones in the San Juans

Today Val and Scott re-deployed a Vemco VR2 fish tag receiver at Lime Kiln State Park. This receiver, provided for this pilot study to Beam Reach by Fred Goetz, will help marine scientists understand how juvenile and adult salmon use the San Juans, in addition to any other passing fish that have been “tagged” (surgically-implanted) with 69 kHz acoustic tags. We at Beam Reach are most interested in the behavior and distribution of adult Chinook salmon, and secondarily any other potential prey of the endangered southern resident killer whales.

The photos above show the mooring prior to being snorkeled down to the pier block that remained from the previous deployment (last November).

Two other VR2s have been provided by Kurt Fresh of NOAA.  (Their serial numbers are: 100910; 100913.)  One will be deployed on the west side of San Juan Island; the other will be placed near Cattle Pass.   We’ve mounted them on short (~2.25m) mooring lines (1.25cm diameter 3-strand poly), supported by single yellow shrimp pot floats (see below).  The base of the receivers will be ~0.75-1m above the bottom.  The floats will be ~1m above the top of the receivers.  The mooring weights are either ~25kg concrete slabs (35cm x 35 cm x 15 cm; see below) or paint buckets filled with cement.  Both types of weights have metal hoops or chain for attaching the mooring line and for lowering during deployments from a boat.

Data and analysis from these deployments will be documented in the Beam Reach science wiki

Connections

As I’ve gone through the Beam Reach program, I’ve subconsciously looked for the one thread weaving each part of the experience together. As redundant as it seems, the truest thread I’ve found is connection.

The first time I consciously thought about connections during the program was while listening to Paul Coltrell during our first day at the Southern Resident Killer Whale (SRKW) Transboundary Naturalist Workshop. He was acting as a representative of Fisheries and Oceans Canada and explaining the steps that the Canadian government had taken to protect killer whales. Something about his explanation made me consider, more fully, the difference between transient killer whales, those who prey on mammals and move in quieter and less stable social groups and resident killer whales, those who prey on fish and move in highly communicative and stable social groups.

Those first few connections sinking into place at the workshop.

It was the first day I truly felt my brain had gone into “Whale Zone,” the name I’ve given to the state of being I find myself in when questioning whales and research. One of things we learned during two days of an incredibly steep learning curve was that residents and transients very rarely associate. They have slight morphological differences, different behaviors, and different sources of food. How can two populations be so similar and also so different?

In my opinion, the difference between the residents and the transients is the demonstration of something geologists call ‘actualism.’ It’s the idea that everything that is happening now has already occurred somewhere in the world. It’s a great way to study things that happened millions of years ago because you can look at something happening now and say that it is happening the same way it would’ve then. In my mind, we are seeing the actualism of speciation, a connection between species forever cemented in time, originating from the one point.

Not all connections I’ve found at Beam Reach are so scientific in nature. Most of them are as personal as can be. Each of us has found different personal connections, friends, family, or strangers who know people we know, who can contribute to our research, whose experiences connect to each one of us in a comforting and strange way.

Jason was trying to explain the name of the street he lives on, a vernacular word for someone ferocious. He couldn’t think of the word jargon and so instead, used the French word ‘patois.’ He didn’t notice he had used it but I was thrilled to hear it. That one word prompted a new connection, a realization that there was someone here who spoke French. I asked him how he learned his French and he explained a bit. We had been talking for a few moments before we realized that we were still speaking French and that no one else in the room could understand a word.

Jason and Val, who bring their own unique connections

The more I look back, the more I think about the connections weaving through all parts of this course, not just through me but through my family, my school or my friends. My dad did an independent study for Val in college on wood waste. The bike I’ve been riding here was brought to me by a complete stranger, transferring an act of kindness he once received and then safeguarded by Scott, prior to my arrival.

I am infinitely grateful to be reminded of the depth of connection between everything in our world. What could be more appropriate to be reminded of in a program about the survival of a population and the changes necessary to make our society sustainable.