Beam Reach

Bathymetry and Jones Island picnic

On land at FHL to Jones Island, North Bay

We loaded the boat on Sunday at noon when the Gato Verde arrived. We departed the Labs after talking with a guest expert: Gary Greene, a marine geologist from the non-profit Tombolo and Moss Landing. Scott had also joined us for some time, fiddling with computers and metadata, though he left us for the night to fullfill his Mother’s day duties. We embarked around 1630 with decent winds and headed for the North Bay of Jones Island.  A beautiful place to spend the night, especially since we were tied up to a dock and were free to roam the small island — a State park. We took advantage of the land opportunity by taking our dinner out to the picnic tables on the beach and finished the night by huddling around a computer to watch a couple episodes of Planet Earth: Iceworld and Caves.

Tim Hunt helps measure lightbulb sounds

Today on land I performed an experiment in order to measure the attenuation of a light bulb breaking under water. At the FHL dock a lined up the array with the CRT in place of hydrophone D. At the other end of the dock I lowered a light bulb about 4.8 m in depth 35m away from the CRT, and 75 away from Hydrophone A, etc, and dropped a weight on the bulb to make it break. I recorded two files, one with our class gain settings, and the second with the gain settings as low as the sound devices allowed me to put them, because I could hear the light bulb breaking under water and I imagined the sound would clip on the recording devices. Tim Hunt helped me out setting up the experiment and gave me some advice.

Garrison Bay to Roche Harbor

Today we focused on fishing for the opening day of lingcod season. Everyone caught at least one fish, with several lingcod (too small for tagging unfortunately), and a few quill back rockfish. Laura caught the first taggable fish, a 26 inch lingcod. The surgery was performed after a few second dip in clove oil water anesthetized the fish. A small lateral incision was made in the ventral side of the fish and the tag was inserted. The incision was stitched up delicately and the patient seemed to be doing well upon release. We spent the whole afternoon fishing around Limekiln with our fish expert Eric and naturalist friend Erin and Jason in Eric’s motorboat for the second lingcod big enough to tag, but we were unsuccessful and had to quit around 5pm.

Snug Harbor to Garrison Bay

Today was a much calmer day on the water, which meant less sailing, but more chance to do science. We headed out from Snug Harbor into Haro Strait in the direction of Kelp Reef. The main experiment of the day was for Laura’s project. We lowered the hydrophone array vertically off the back of the Gato Verde and then tried to implode light bulbs about 100 meters from the array. If you get the light bulb to implode it makes a nice sound source at depth. Unfortunately we must have been too shallow as the light bulbs did not implode at depth. We’ll have to try that experiment again at a later date. Dominique also spent a fair amount of time learning how to use Noble Tech software (nautical chart software) that incorporates AIS (Automatic Identification System). Ships over about 65 feet give off a signal that lets others with an AIS receiver in the area receive the position and other information on that ship. Since Dominique is interested in the effects of ship noise of Southern Resident killer whale hearing, it will be important for her to know how far away the ship past us while she is recording their noise. After our day of experiments we headed in to Roche Harbor to pump out and then snuck around the corner into Garrison Bay to anchor. After dinner the students went ashore to English Camp (a National Historical Park) to stretch their legs. After returning to the boat we had our journal club meeting, during which we discussed a paper that modelled the acoustic impact of whale watching vessels on killer whales.

Aleck Bay to Snug Harbor

Departing this morning around 9:30 am, we left Aleck Bay and headed up Haro Strait along the west side of San Juan Island. We took advantage of the slack tide to head up the strait and around noon used the changing tide push up as it flooded. It was a great sailing day! We reached 10 knots at one point and focused the day on perfecting our line and sail handling. Once anchored, we engaged in collecting recordings to calibrate our hydrophones. After a great dinner of Jason’s rosemary delight potatoes and Comrade Spengler’s (and assistance LH) delicious salad of mixed greens and cranberries, dressed oh so gently with a balsamic vinaigrette, we analyzed the data files from the newest version of the O’VAL software. We noticed that the Marantz files had large low-frequency excursions that made measuring the rms of the recorded call impossible. Let’s look into this the next time we put the Blue Box hydrophone into the water. The Sound Devices files (perhaps because the signal had been high pass filtered at 240 Hz) looked great!!! Good work == LED watchers!

Port Angeles to Aleck Bay

Today we got an early start at 7:30 am due to small craft advisory warnings and strong winds reaching 30-35 knots. We weighed anchor and cooked breakfast as well as did our chores while under way. We planned to reach False Bay at the south end of San Juan Island by noon, taking into account the wind and wave advisories; we experienced calm, flat waters instead, with some scattered rain fall. To take advantage of this weather, we passed over Salmon Bank, a shallow area with interesting bathymetric profiles, to record bathymetry with the echoloctor. Shortly after, the group deployed the CRT hydrophone as well as the hydrophone array in order to practice properly getting them into the water as well as play with the gain settings. We took recordings from all four channels for a background noise exercise which we threw ourselves into after dinner. We got experience plugging files into one of Val’s programs designed to read RMS and convert it into dB. We also calculated signal to noise ratios for multiple sound files.

Friday Harbor Labs to Port Angeles

Today after our day at land we left Friday Harbor Labs to make our way to Port Angeles, with the hope of seeing the transients at Race Rocks and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We did not deploy anything besides the Gato Verde hydrophone for opportunistic listening, and throughout the day analyzed and localized our data from 4-25-08. We did not find any whales today, but spotted harbor seals and Stellar sea lions at Race Rocks. We also spotted loons, perhaps a yearling bald eagle, and the mountains of the Olympic Peninsula.

Parks Bay to FHL

We made the short passage to FHL in the morning and spent the rest of the day cleaning, reprovisioning, and relaxing.

Roche Harbor to Parks Bay

After leaving Roche Harbor we went across Haro Straight into Canadian waters. We waited there for the currents in Spieden Channel to slacken. While there we did a localization exercise. Ryan and Jason had the speaker in the dinghy and we had the array deployed and did a drive by recording the calls they made. During the recordings we noted the distances and bearings of the dinghy in relation to the Gato Verde. We made a total of four recordings. This allowed us to practice using the hydrophone array as well as collect data which we can use to practice localizing calls. We anchored in Parks Bay to facilitate a quick return to FHL tomorrow morning.

Snug Harbor to Roche Harbor

The Earth Day mooring kept us secure all night. Our science goals today are to keep working on methods, practice using and deploying the sound devices and hydrophones, and hopefully encounter actual whales for recording data.We practiced using the acoustic fish tags and saw how far we could detect them off Lime Kiln. The furthest distance was around a quarter of a nautical mile. We used the high frequency hydrophone to record the bleeps from the tags (pings). The raw data from these tests was loaded in a new folder titled with today’s date.