Beam Reach

out to sea

i didn’t get a chance to post these at port while at sea- so here’s my journal entries from the last few weeks:

4-20-08

Well it’s my first official night on the Gato Verde. Lo and behold I ended up in the portside forecastle – I volunteered, I kind of like it. It’s definitely the smallest space I’ve ever slept in – but it’s roomier than I thought – though I wonder how organized I’m actually going to be (and how moist).

But here the sea is completely around me, literally 6 inches to the right and left of me – I can hear every creek of the boat and the ripples of the water – I have a little port hole window looking out to the water and a hatch to look straight out to the sky – I know I’m not very far away from everyone (I can hear Juan and Ryan talk at the moment) but I’ve already gotten lost in solitude here.

I remember my time in the forecastle last time in the Harvey Gamage – the initial anxiety that soon turned into comfort, ease, and enjoyment – I’m just slightly in the anxiety phase right now – that I hope I can do everything phase-

In fact tomorrow I’ll be getting up to explore Jones Island a bit with Scott!

 4-22-08

Earth Day!

Today we headed out of Prevost Harbor into the high seas after spending the night at the dock at Stewart Island. We had maybe 3-4 foot waves with 20-30 knot winds! It was my favorite time to sail – I love the adventure of it!

The night before I strolled around Stewart Island – it was so quiet – all I could hear was my echo travel in a circle around the inland water and the croaking of frogs.

5-2-08

So much has happened that I haven’t blogged about- guess I’ve been out at sea too long (I’m not complaining).

I definitely got over that anxiety part- I sure don’t mind my bunk and life on the boat got easy pretty quick- I don’t even mind not eating meat (except with a few occasional binges on shore). We haven’t seen any whales yet (we’re starting to wonder why they aren’t here), but we did see some Stellars and a Dall’s Porpoise (I’m still pulling to see a Gray whale). There have been some wonderful quiet nights and sunsets while anchored on the Gato Verde and it’s great to just be surrounded by nature and the tides are the currents.

Even though some of us seemed a bit groggy to get back on the boat last week for our second round, I quickly woke out of it when we decided to head out for Port Angeles in search of transients. I had very much wanted to go to the Olympic Peninsula – and it was good to on a “far” voyage from the San Juan islands – though we didn’t encounter any rough seas…I don’t think mountains or the sea for that matter will ever cease to fascinate me!

And yesterday I caught my first ever fish (3 for that matter…)!! (and yes I have been fishing before- I just was never lucky enough to catch a fish!). Eric came by to try out his fish tags for the lingcod- and I caught a 26-inch lingcod that we named Ted for our first candidate! The surgery went well and after my shaky release of Ted we could hear his sonar tag with the hydrophone! Today as we wait as Roche Harbor for our broken engine were going to go back out again to get another fish for the second tag- all of the few fish we caught yesterday afternoon either became eagle food or food for eagle disputes – perhaps I’ll catch another one!

Other than that my primary work has been to figure out how to make my own high frequency “clicks” to play under water. So far I have attempted to burst a light bulb and get the speaker to play some previously recorded clicks, although they don’t have a great enough amplitude yet in my opinion to be heard under water, or travel very far either- but I think once I get part this hurdle I can really move forward in my project, and while I don’t need the whales as my as my classmates- I really do hope they come when we are back at sea in a week.

first sailing component

Since the last entry, nearly two whole weeks of sailing have gone by! Unfortunately, I am posting a blog because the engine is out of commission for the next couple days as salt water got sucked into it through the air intakes; until it gets fixed, we sit here at Roche Harbor amongst the fancy yachts with terrible names such as the Victoria’s Other Seacret, Neverland, and La Sea. There is one perk, however…well, two, the first being that there are coin-operated showers!! Big deal here on the Gato Verde where freshwater is in high demand and short supply, especially hot water which is contingent on the engine running-this is further hard to come by on a vessel which primarily propels itself by harnessing wind power. Number two perk: the vessel thoughtfully broke down in a time where the whales seem to have disappeared. I should be used to no-sighting events like these occurring and certainly should have learned by now to never get my hopes too high-but it’s hard!!  I guess what I have learned is that I will inevitably get excited beyond the point of healthy when it comes to whale sightings.  I am starting to worry about when they will return in order to start gathering data. While I am starting to become more and more confident that I will be more useful and productive on the policy end of ocean/marine mammal conservation, I am also finding it more and more vital to have participated in the research process first in order to most effect conservation. For this to happen I need those orcas!!
On the other hand, sailing in the absence of whales has been simply amazing and has passed the time quite quickly. When they do finally decide to grace us with their presence, we will be super sailors handling those lines and sails like pros. My favorite part of the day has been raising the main sail. It’s getting the point where the captain has altered his offer to raise the sail to “does anybody BUT Dominique want to raise the main sail?” Sometime soon though, he promised I’ll get to do it by myself!
With so few people on the boat, I’ve been able to frequently participate in most every sail task, resulting in a much better understanding of wind and wave dynamics, how sails should be set in response to such dynamics, and how to manage the sails and lines in different conditions and situations. My second favorite part of the day is the navigation duty. This job requires one to listen to the VHF radio in order to gather local marine weather forecasts, check tides and currents and their forces as well as list any navigational hazards we might encounter. From this gleaned information the navigator must pick a destination which suits the tides and weather conditions and figure out how long it will take to get there. Fun! Finally, my third favorite part of the day is bedtime. Being out in the elements, which are always quite numbingly cold, combined with moving about and maintaining balance on a boat for 11-12 hours is really tiring! The gentle rocking of the boat only makes it more difficult not to simply lay back and be lulled to sleep. I have never before gone to bed at 10pm for more than one or two nights in a row! I haven’t even been able to finish my book as 10 pages per night are all I can muster before crashing, despite the cold.
Overall everything is going well as there is never a shortage of things to do, both sailing related as well as practice-data collection and analysis related. My inevitable inability to stay warm hasn’t even been able to sour the experience! The scenery is beautiful and my pictures folder on the computer is filling exponentially by day with shots of the landscape, sailing, classmates, and organisms we’ve encountered so far. Surprisingly, though, I’m finding I miss northern New England and even Maine, much to the satisfaction and “told you so” of some in particular.

Garrison Bay to Roche Harbor

Today we focused on fishing for the opening day of lingcod season. Everyone caught at least one fish, with several lingcod (too small for tagging unfortunately), and a few quill back rockfish. Laura caught the first taggable fish, a 26 inch lingcod. The surgery was performed after a few second dip in clove oil water anesthetized the fish. A small lateral incision was made in the ventral side of the fish and the tag was inserted. The incision was stitched up delicately and the patient seemed to be doing well upon release. We spent the whole afternoon fishing around Limekiln with our fish expert Eric and naturalist friend Erin and Jason in Eric’s motorboat for the second lingcod big enough to tag, but we were unsuccessful and had to quit around 5pm.

Real Time Chart of the Gato Verde

This is a cool new feature we’ve just implemented. On the Gato Verde we’ve got a transponder that sends a signal every 10 minutes or so and it is logged in a database so that we know where the boat is. The company that makes this transponder is called SPOT and they created a new map sharing tool that allows us to safely share the near-real-time position of the Gato Verde.

I don’t have it confirmed yet, but I think I just saw the GV sail past Lime Kiln. When I look at the SPOT chart it seems possible. It’s fun to look at the chart, listen to Orcasound, and watch the Orcacam.

Here are the links:

http://beamreach.org/map.html

http://www.whaleresearch.com/thecenter/orcacam01.html

http://orcasound.net/

Enjoy!

Snug Harbor to Garrison Bay

Today was a much calmer day on the water, which meant less sailing, but more chance to do science. We headed out from Snug Harbor into Haro Strait in the direction of Kelp Reef. The main experiment of the day was for Laura’s project. We lowered the hydrophone array vertically off the back of the Gato Verde and then tried to implode light bulbs about 100 meters from the array. If you get the light bulb to implode it makes a nice sound source at depth. Unfortunately we must have been too shallow as the light bulbs did not implode at depth. We’ll have to try that experiment again at a later date. Dominique also spent a fair amount of time learning how to use Noble Tech software (nautical chart software) that incorporates AIS (Automatic Identification System). Ships over about 65 feet give off a signal that lets others with an AIS receiver in the area receive the position and other information on that ship. Since Dominique is interested in the effects of ship noise of Southern Resident killer whale hearing, it will be important for her to know how far away the ship past us while she is recording their noise. After our day of experiments we headed in to Roche Harbor to pump out and then snuck around the corner into Garrison Bay to anchor. After dinner the students went ashore to English Camp (a National Historical Park) to stretch their legs. After returning to the boat we had our journal club meeting, during which we discussed a paper that modelled the acoustic impact of whale watching vessels on killer whales.

Aleck Bay to Snug Harbor

Departing this morning around 9:30 am, we left Aleck Bay and headed up Haro Strait along the west side of San Juan Island. We took advantage of the slack tide to head up the strait and around noon used the changing tide push up as it flooded. It was a great sailing day! We reached 10 knots at one point and focused the day on perfecting our line and sail handling. Once anchored, we engaged in collecting recordings to calibrate our hydrophones. After a great dinner of Jason’s rosemary delight potatoes and Comrade Spengler’s (and assistance LH) delicious salad of mixed greens and cranberries, dressed oh so gently with a balsamic vinaigrette, we analyzed the data files from the newest version of the O’VAL software. We noticed that the Marantz files had large low-frequency excursions that made measuring the rms of the recorded call impossible. Let’s look into this the next time we put the Blue Box hydrophone into the water. The Sound Devices files (perhaps because the signal had been high pass filtered at 240 Hz) looked great!!! Good work == LED watchers!

Port Angeles to Aleck Bay

Today we got an early start at 7:30 am due to small craft advisory warnings and strong winds reaching 30-35 knots. We weighed anchor and cooked breakfast as well as did our chores while under way. We planned to reach False Bay at the south end of San Juan Island by noon, taking into account the wind and wave advisories; we experienced calm, flat waters instead, with some scattered rain fall. To take advantage of this weather, we passed over Salmon Bank, a shallow area with interesting bathymetric profiles, to record bathymetry with the echoloctor. Shortly after, the group deployed the CRT hydrophone as well as the hydrophone array in order to practice properly getting them into the water as well as play with the gain settings. We took recordings from all four channels for a background noise exercise which we threw ourselves into after dinner. We got experience plugging files into one of Val’s programs designed to read RMS and convert it into dB. We also calculated signal to noise ratios for multiple sound files.

Friday Harbor Labs to Port Angeles

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 our data from 4-25-08. We did not find any whales today, but spotted harbor seals and Stellar sea lions at Race Rocks. We also spotted loons, perhaps a yearling bald eagle, and the mountains of the Olympic Peninsula.

Showah day

We didn’t see any orcas the first week out but we did learn a lot and we had fun and beautiful weather a lot of the time. I like the following chores the best: navigation, systems log, and swab the decks (it’s fun to use the squeegee) , in that order. The most fun place to hang out is the trampoline, but the cabins are cozy which makes them nice. We got to trek around on Jones Island a little bit on our first night out and there were a lot of bald eagles (juveniles and adults) all over the place. We have gotten to practice some recording and localizing and I really think we will be ready when we run into the orcas .

Parks Bay to FHL

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