Beam Reach

bloggin from Snug

the whales are back!

 yesterday after making a few phone calls in the morning we found J-pod off the southern tip of San Juan! We got some wonderful recordings along Salmon Bank – and even though it was cold, raining, and miserable, I don’t think any one of the beam reacher’s noticed – in fact I think I can say for everyone it was our best day yet – I’ve never seen so many breaches and tail slaps in my life!!

 The coolest part was when J27 was following directly behind us for about 20 minutes (he seemed to like us) not only did he completely jump out of the water (which we could pick up on the radar!) but he clicked away loud and clear staight towards our hydrophones – and we’re pretty sure we got some foraging actions with all his deep dives and clear clicks with no calls for the duration. It was very cool and I can’t wait to look at the data!

 My other task, (which of course is more reliant on finding time now in between our hopefully now frequent sightings) is to start deploying my light bulb clicks and test for some masking effects. I was a bit daughted for a while about getting it all done, mostly because I hadn’t actually found a good enough mechanism for making a click – but my most recent recordings show that my light bulb bursts aren’t so bad after all- so now I feel like I’m going somewhere.

 It should only get better (and busy busy busier) from now on – and it should be sunny and warm by the end of this week!!

~Laura~

Dr. Holt guidance and CT profile

Roche Harbor to Snug Harbor

We didn’t catch up to the whales again today, but there were some conflicting reports, probably because some transients were in the area of Kelp Reef and then moved down past Discovery Island. Under that decoy cover it seems that J-pod headed north past Active Pass, probably heading for the Fraser River again. Although we didn’t see whales we did have a very productive science day. Marla finished off her lecture on masking, critical ratios, critical bandwidths, directional effects on masking, and temporary threshold shifts. It is always good to have her expertise available to the students as they are grappling with these complex issues. During the day we managed to deploy the CTD to measure the sound speed profile at various depths. The sound speed was very close to 1480 meters per second at all but the deepest points we went, where it peaked at 1482 meters per second. We dropped Val and Marla off at Snug in the afternoon and spent the rest of our time analyzing data. The students are making good progress on our data from yesterday which is exciting. Keep tuned in for exciting findings….