Beam Reach

Gato Verde source level

Friday 8/31/07
Fish Creek to Snug Harbor
Winds SW 5-15 knots, light rain in morning

Spent morning measuring source level of Gato Verde main generator. Around noon, started transit to Snug Harbor, looking for KW en route. Sighted some harbor porpoises in Haro Strait on run downwind under screecher.

Searching Haro and measuring receive levels

Thursday 8/30/07
Garrison Bay to Fish Creek
Winds S 5-20 kts, sunny

Pump out at Roche Harbor. Travel south into Haro Strait winds, practicing tacks and going with the ebb. Search for killer whales on E/W beam reaches just N of Middle Bank. In late afternoon, ride flood through Cattle Pass (at 12 knots over the ground) and anchor in Griffin Bay, just N of Fish Creek. Spend evening processing spreading experiment data from dock experiment, learning how to measure Vrms and compute calibrated receive level of both test signals and background noise.

Meeting Fall 071 students in person

I got out of the office last week (yeah!) and got to meet the Fall 2007 students. It was fantastic.

I spend the majority of my working time telling students about this program and helping them through the application process. So I “get to know” most of our students before they arrive. Mostly via email and phone conversations. It was really great to meet everyone at the beginning of the program and put faces and names together. (Yes, I’m a bit of a mother hen, so it did me good to see that they’d all arrived safely with my own two eyes. And it took some restraint not to slip into full mother hen mode!)

San Juan Island is an amazing place. Even though it’s the busy time in the islands right now, it was so peaceful and quite. While I was checking in with my family via cell phone in the morning I watched three sea otters rolling and playing in the water at my feet. You just don’t see that often in Seattle.

Instructor Jason Wood and his family fed me a great meal with all locally grown food. We talked a lot about sustainability and eating and what role it plays in our lives. They’ve made a real commitment to eating healthy and locally. They inspired me to join a local CSA (community supported agriculture). Jubilee Farm is just outside Seattle and they have a local drop right in my Ballard neighborhood. I’ve thought about doing it for a while and I’m really excited to give it a try. Thanks Wendy, Jason, Tristan, and Echo for the inspiration.
The students jump right in (literally) see the photos: https://beamreach.org/gallery/v/071/

I think it will be really exciting to see how they pursue their research and the questions the program will force them to think about. (You get really intimate with your impact on the environment when you live on a boat- where does the sewage go anyway? You see what I mean.) I am looking forward to watching their progress (even though I’ll have to do most of my watching from afar).

I hope they’ll all join me in blogging so we can all see what they are up to and how they are doing.

Good luck everyone!

Tracy

Thursday was a long yet bright day

This morning, Jason and I showed a number of our research interests and interspersed these with various demonstrations and class activities. It was fun to watch you students sitting with your heads down on your desks and raising your hand when I dropped the audio frequency going into our speakers down below about 19 kHz and putting your hands back down when the frequency went up a bit. All this was far, far above anything I could hear. I know you all can hear very, very well. This bodes well for the course!

I hope that Dr. Stern (our expected evening speaker on Minke whales) got back safely from the sea after his vessels motor failed.

See you tomorrow — let’s cool off!

Fall 2007 group picture (via wpg2)

Here’s a great group photo of the fall 2007 class (taken by Tracy Smith):

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You can see a *lot* more eye candy in the Beam Reach photo gallery.

Attention Beam Reach bloggers!  This has been a test of the little G2 button that lives above the WordPress “write post” composition window.  If you get the passwords and usernames set properly between WordPress and Gallery, you should be able to click on that G2 button with the tree and insert any image from the Beam Reach photo gallery.