Recollections from a week at sea

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to join the Beam Reach students at sea for a week. Thanks to my wife, Annie, and my mother, Leslie, I was able to step away from being a dad for a while and return to the equally intense experience of conducting field science at sea and thinking hard with a talented group of students and teachers.

I’ll blog in more detail about some of the highlights from my week, but first I want to offer a few photos, recollections, and associated vignettes:

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  • Throughout the trip, I felt the pressing need to measure how we (humans) sound under water and to assess our acoustic impact(s) on the SRKW and the soundscape. It’s hard to make these measurements, but we are capable of it — and all of us on the water have a moral obligation to learn about our own acoustic signature, educate ourselves about its significance and possible mitigation, and to act to reduce any impacts we may cause.
  • Trying to listen to orca recordings on the rattling upper deck of a WA State Ferry was symbolic. Just as the in-air ferry noise masked the recorded killer whale calls I was attempting to categorize, the State Ferries are among the most prevalent and intense sources of marine noise in the critical habitat of the southern residents and are therefore one of the most likely sources of noise that could mask killer whale communication. As an organization, it is high time we reached out to the local ferries and helped them understand the origin of the noise, its source level, and its mitigation. Perhaps this could be a service project in 2008?
  • Kelly Balcomb, Deni Malouf, and staff of the Center for Whale Research motored by when I was on the water to say hello. It was great to see that they had found a way to execute photoidentification work and prey/feces sampling from the same boat. We heard their outboards on the array (at a range of about 10m) and I promised to send them a sound clip. With luck, Tim will be able to measure their source level with calibrated array hydrophones during controlled experiments, too.
  • Mike dodges a ship in the fog. On a couple of days there was an unusual tongue of thick fog that crept up the west side of San Juan Island. While I was wondering if it was related to a physical oceanographic feature (colder, upwelling water?), Mike said “I have a bad feeling about this.” He had been diligently watching a radar target that seemed like it might be moving through the thick fog that engulfed us — or maybe was just part of the west side coastline? He made a quick U-turn and we could all hear a big ship cross our stern, though none of us could see it…
  • Calibrating the sewage tank. Ah, at last. It took some convincing to keep Liz and Wessal carrying the 20-liter bucket from the starboard rail to the starboard head (marine toilet), but we persevered (with Heather taking notes and me getting closed up in the sewage locker to measure the tank level more accurately with a flashlight). Ultimately, we gained two long-sought-after numbers by pumping sea water into the empty tank: the number of liters per full (up/down) stroke of the hand pump (flushing mechanism), and the true total volume of the holding tank. It may be counter-intuitive, but these numbers govern how much science you can get done on the Gato Verde, for — if you decide not to pump out over the border as many Canadians do — the holding tank usually determines when you must leave the field to seek a pump-out station… (I’ll blog about sewage in greater detail later…)
  • Cleaning out the head pump. Usually Todd gets the pleasure of unclogging the heads. It’s a touchy subject, but since Captain Mike was in his first week and wasn’t familiar with the Gato Verde’s plumbing, I took one for the team. It turns out there’s a flapper valve on the inlet to the pump that you can access with a carefully gloved hand. Unclogging it was easy (though un-nerving) and — bonus — I have gained further rationale for promoting a roughage-rich (vegetarian) diet for Beam Reachers while aboard the boat! Soft bowl movements are the flapper valve’s friend…
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    • The excitement I felt when hearing orca calls on the radio while 1/2 mile offshore. All visitors to the west side of San Juan Island should know that underwater sound is broadcast live on FM radio station 88.1 MHz. We had lost track of the southern residents (they often seem to “disappear” when you least expect it), so for the first time I really benefitted from the FM transmitter atop the Lime Kiln State Park lighthouse. While scanning Haro Strait with the binoculars, I was surprised to hear clear calls from Lime Kiln where the hydrophone is just 10m offshore and 8m down. Focusing on that part of the shoreline, I could see tourists concentrated in front of the rising fins of orcas. The residents had surfaced right next to shore and were nigh impossible to see against the dark metamorphosed basalt of the Island’s coastline. Note: the FM transmitters have a range of a couple kilometers and a second one is located about a kilometer south of Smuggler’s Cove (at Val’s house, known as OrcaSound).
    • We should be helping Soundwatch and Straitwatch educate boaters. After watching a big cruiser violate the voluntary 1/2 mile no-go zone around Lime Kiln lighthouse, paralleling the whales <100m off the Lime Kiln shoreline right in front of hundreds of tourists, I decided Beam Reach should take a more active role in educating boaters about how to be Whale Wise. In the past, I’ve leaned towards measuring first, and educating later. But with the Soundwatch vessel’s engines disabled by a bad head gasket and the Straitwatch vessel already over-burdened, why shouldn’t the Beam Reach staff and students (not to mention Whale Watch captains/naturalists) by hailing such boats on VHF channel 16 to ensure the Captains know the voluntary (soon to be mandatory) boating regulations? Perhaps we could/should also broadcast hydrophone signals from the boat on a VHF or FM channel for the whale watching, recreational, and fishing fleets? [Whoa, another service project.]
    • Trying to let Wessal push her limits, but also avert disaster. There’s no question that Wessal is gung ho. I don’t know if it’s because she has relatives who are boat mechanics, or what, but when she took hold of the outboard engine on the Gatito (Gato Verde’s tender), she showed no fear. She did a great job of maneuvering through the kelp to grab some supplies that Val handed us from shore, but on the way back she got up on a plane and inspired me to (again) find the boundary between teaching by inquiry (like a good Beam Reach instructor) and mitigating risk (like a good Beam Reach administrator). Picture my left hand clutching the seat in front of me, my right poised surreptitiously just above hers, the tiller, and the too-sensitive throttle. I don’t know if she noticed my white knuckles as I tried to stay present and enjoy the ride while worst case scenarios skittered and cartwheeled through my imagination.
    • The joy of not shaving for a week. My grad school advisor, Russ McDuff, instilled this oceanographic tradition in me. I shaved it off the night I got back to civilization, but I enjoyed the rare pleasure of growing a pirate’s countenance.
    • Falling asleep listening to leopard seals recordings.
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    • The stunning beauty of the Pacific Northwest — the sunsets, water textures, and mountain range silhouettes

    There are many more memories, but those are my favorites. It was a pleasure meeting all of the 071 students in person at last. I look forward to another week-long immersion this Sept 26 – Oct 3!

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