Beam Reach

VaTo week 2 at sea

Sunday – Tuesday, September 9-11, 2007

Sunday, Gato Verde docked at the FHL docks and the crew swap began. Lots of students headed toward showers and a bit of distance and 5 eager souls brought loads and loads of food on board. We motored a bit south and anchored in Griffin Bay. That night a ‘heavy breather’ seal entertained us. We listened through two hydrophones and Ash and Sam showed there acuity in accurately determining the bearing of the sounds of objects thrown in various directions. The night was calm and the sunrise elegant.

Where are the whales? We did not know so we talked about methods and then set up a whale pass-by. This was done by putting the underwater speaker in the dinghy and anchoring the dinghy in a little bay on the south side of Lopez. We deployed the array and the high frequency hydrophone and drove around observing the stationary “dinghy-orca”.  Then I drove the dinghy at high speed to generate some boat noise.  Todd calmly told me on the radio that I should pull up the dinghy’s anchor before taking off. This neat thought came to me as I was zipping along at ~20 kts, anchor flying behind me! It will be good to see just what it takes to ‘analyze’ these data.

Today, Sept. 11, began with long discussions of lots of important ‘stuff’ and mid-morning we set off. Since we didn’t know where the whales were, we let the current draw us toward the sea (Straits of Juan de Fuca). It turned out that Alex’s suggestion that we go toward Race Rocks was prescient. By afternoon, we got reports of J, K, and L pods incoming west of Victoria. Tim and Ann configured a 3-d array by attaching the ‘high-frequency’ hydrophone below the array and everyone worked to get everything in the water and connected to the various computers and recorders. Cameras and protractors and note papers and range-finder were limbered up and THEN, the orcas came. They were spread out and not vocalizing. Later, as we approached San Juan Island, just south of the Lighthouse, vocals began and lots and lots of files were recorded and observations. It will be a huge effort to make any sense of this.

Good luck, Beam Reachers!