Beam Reach

Elf Shoe Extravaganza

Friday, September 21, 2007

Wes and Heather prepared scrambled eggs, avocado, and toast for breakfast. After chores and our morning meeting, we lifted anchor at Mackaye Harbor. Wes, Liz, and Kenna hoisted the main and unfurled the screecher. Mike was going over parts of the boat with all the students, while Shannon read over students’ methods for their proposals and Jason worked on amp calibration. Jason got a call from a previous BeamReacher who had spotted whales heading south from Lime Kiln, so we pulled in the screecher and headed north along the coast of San Juan Island. We found members of J and L pods. We spent about five hours with the whales again today—recording calls, whistles and echolocation clicks, and recording surface behaviors, bearing, distance, and identification. We watched spyhops, breaches, tail slaps, and pec slaps. We also caught many glimpses of the highly elusive elf shoes and Elise even snapped a couple of photos.< Just as we were getting ready to head back south for the evening, Tim and Ashley radioed us from Prince of Whales, a whale watching vessel they had joined for the day from Victoria. As the sun was setting, Kenna and Shannon prepared eggplant parmesan for dinner and we headed into Fisherman’s Bay on Lopez Island.

A Quiet Night at the Labs

It is a Friday night. My big plans are to watch a movie and eat popcorn. It’s been a busy week, and I’m enjoying the quiet.

Our time on land has been productive. We did an exercise on energy and human dietary choices, did a statistics exercise, met with the sea group for an amazing curry dinner- thank you sea group for cooking delicious food so that I didn’t have to eat another turkey sandwich, and talked about sustainability and choices in our lives. And we turned in our final research proposals. I finally settled on a topic. I will be investigating the effects of depth on the killer whale’s production of echolocation clicks. To do this, we will have to stop the boat and deploy the hydrophone array vertically through the water column. Everyone else can collect their data from a horizontally towed array. I guess this is just one more example of me wanting to do something different and independent.

Like I said above, it’s been a busy week. Even our time off has been productive. Alex went to Lacrover Farm to wash onions in the cold wind. Sam went out to the Center for Whale Research to move rocks (there was no data to be entered, so why not move rocks?), and tomorrow she’s going to Seattle to “bounce sound off of fish.” Tim and Ash are in Victoria, Canada. Tim is talking to whale watching operators to arrange “drive-bys” so that he can make recordings of underwater boat noise. The two are probably enjoying big city life. And I went to the Whale Museum today to meet with their education director to talk about possible volunteer opportunities. I will be creating part of a presentation that will be given to school groups on the Southern Resident Killer Whales and their acoustic environment. I will also be part of (coordinating?) the Whale Museum’s event for the People for Puget Sound’s 2007 Kid’s Day. I’m not quite sure what this means, but the day is a month off, and it should be a lot of fun.

Tomorrow, Alex and I are going to tackle shopping for a week’s worth of food for nine people. We’re determined to have it all done in two hours or less. This means I can’t linger over all of the beautiful vegetables at the farmer’s market, but I will definitely have to buy some lemon cucumbers (like a regular cucumber, but yellow, lemon shaped, and especially delicious) and ana kiwis (grape-sized, fuzz free kiwis that grow on island).

Now, time for that popcorn…