A Few Days of Catch Up

6/27 The Rescue


It has been settled; I’m moving out of Monterey and will become a professional transient for a while. This is all very sudden for me, and was not at all in my plans (which is what makes it so great). I came down to Australia to gain experience in field research with marine mammals, in order to make my CV decorated enough for grad school. After talking to some of the people from this project, I decided to come back for a second study working with humpbacks in Eastern Australia in September, and booked my flight last week. It looks like I’ll have to cancel that flight now and book a one way ticket to the land down under instead, since I accepted a job working as a marine mammal observer on industrial vessels in and around Aussie

A few days ago I was approached by a person who hires people for Marine Mammal Observer (MMO) work, and was offered a job starting mid July. There are many avenues as a MMO, most of which deal with ensuring that no wildlife is harmed during oil and gas exploration cruises. This particular job would be 10 days on 10 days off aboard a dredger north of the Great Barrier Reef. I would be posted on the bridge during operations, and would watch for any sea snakes, marine mammals, birds...anything that may be harmed during the dredging process. If any wildlife wondered within a certain radius of the vessel, I would order the captain to cease operations until the threat was over. This would mean shutting down some pretty expensive operations, and I’m told that those who fulfil these positions are not well liked by the crew (sort of like the bond company stooge in The Life Aquatic). But like the stooge in the movie, this is sometimes not the case, and it depends on the vessel. This position would last for 5 weeks, just enough to buy my time before my next internship begins. After HARC is over at the end of October, and depending on how well I do on the dredging project, I may have work as an MMO on offshore oil exploration vessels for the next year or two. This would entail similar duties to the dredging project, expect the coast for shutting down operations is extremely high, and I would be watching for the presence of whale and dolphins. The offshore gigs are usually 5 weeks on and 5 weeks off.

This is all very sudden and scary, but it’s an opportunity that I can’t pass up. As of right now, I will be back in Monterey around July 12th for a few weeks to pack up my room and finish things up with my job as a whale watching skipper. I hope to take the boat out a few more times to get a few last looks at the wildlife of Monterey, maybe I’ll be able to convince some of you to come out with me. I also hope to see everyone in July before I leave, so try not to go anywhere the first few weeks. Don’t worry Sam if you’re reading this, I will sleep downstairs on the couch (you have my room up until August). The biggest heartbreak will be leaving Reef, who has been my loyal shadow for the past 4 years. He’s really going to miss me, and it kills me to leave. But I can’t pass up this opportunity because of a dog, regardless of the fact that he’s the best dog in the world. He will have a good home with the parents. Just as a word of advice to those who are wondering whether taking risks in life is worth it, it totally is. This one internship alone has the potential to completely change my life.

On another subject, the whales are starting to pick up in numbers now. Today we had 100 whale pass by the headland, some within 100 meters from the rocks. The weather was hot, so a few of us decided to jump off the headland and snorkel around the point in search of manta rays and dolphins. I consider myself to be a strong swimmer, comfortable with the ocean and being in surgy conditions, and tolerant of the cold. The same goes for Zeus (one of the 3 that went snorkelling). The third guy, Paul, who we thought were all of those things, turned out to be none of them. Mom, again this is where you should skip this paragraph. To set the scene, the jump into the water is about 3 meters if that, not high at all. You have to time it right so that a wave doesn’t jostle you around when you enter the water. Zeus jumped in first, followed by myself, than finally Paul (who asked several times how deep the water was....which was clearly deep enough). Not a good sign. Where we entered was part of a gorge that cuts into the headland. From there, you have to swim out and turn north along the cliff face of the headland, then hang a let around another corner west which goes around to Frenchman’s beach. All and all I’d say it’s about a half mile swim; it took us about 20 minutes. Paul instantly was in a panic the moment he hit the water, and it’s very difficult to climb up the rock once you’re in. It’s possible, but it’s easier to just swim around to Frenchman’s. He was saying that the water was too cold for him and it was screwing with his breathing (the water is about 75 degrees by the way, not exactly freezing but it’s not Fiji). Luckily Zeus and I have been trained in SCUBA rescue, and locked your arms with his while he was on his back, and took turns swimming him in while he calmed down and caught his breath. He eventually started to fill better, and I gave him my fins to make his swim in easier. In the end everything was OK, and we learned a valuable lesson; don’t go in the water if you’re not comfortable and confident in your ability to survive. We were preoccupied trying to save Paul’s life, and didn’t see much during the snorkel (but we frequently see manta rays in the area, and are planning on trying it again without Paul). I know what you’re going to say Mom, you just have to trust me.

The snorkel route goes right past Norm’s Seat, where we set and watch for whales. The team managed to track our movements on the Theodolite, and determined we were swimming at about 1k/hour (not bad for a rescue). We were planning on breaching and pec slapping in front of them, but forgot and just mooned them instead. Tomorrow I’ve been asked to help someone from Woodshole deploy a hydrophone array near a group of rocks offshore of the point. We leave sometime in the morning on the Beluga from Amity, a 30 minute trip on the water to Point Lookout. It will be a 3 person job, lowering a series of weights that will hold a few hydrophones suspended in the water for a few weeks. She wants to record the sounds of the waves on the rocks, and then play them back in an area where no rocks are present, to see if the humpbacks react to the sounds (possibly indicating that they use the sound of the surf for navigation). It’s late here, and I should sleep. Sorry about not having any photos right now, not enough time to deal with them. Miss you all.
6/28 Science Can be a Bitch
The normal routine of counting whale was broken for me today, and the weather wasn’t pissing down or blowing. Dave, Anne, and I took the Beluga out from Amity harbor to just offshore of point lookout to deploy some acoustic instruments. Dave may be my pseudo boss soon (the guy who is hiring me for MMO work), and Anne is the one who is working on her PhD through WHOI (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute). It was a nice day full of scientific adventure and brief moments of nervous stomach pains.

To get to Point Lookout from Amity harbor, you have to cross over a very shallow and unpredictable bar (a shallow spit of sand). By their nature, sand bars are constantly shifting, which means that the channel is irregular and impassable at times. The swell today was less than a meter, so the waves were not breaking much along the bar. We weaved our way through 2 meter deep water with cresting surf on either side; life jackets dawned and hands a grip on the gunnels (this is an exaggeration, it wasn’t that bad....although we all still wore lifejackets). Once outside of the bar, it was a short 20 minute boat ride to Boat Rock, the sight selected for the deployment of the hydrophone (underwater microphone) array. We have watched many pods of whales pass by this feature offshore, about 1 kilometer from our perch atop Mt. Olympus.

The deployment of the array was not easy. We motored just up current of Boat Rock in about 25 meters depth, and searched the echo sounder and GPS for the appropriate spot. Once located, we carefully lowered three 25kilo weights attached to each other in a line, separated by 60 meters of chain. This was no simple task, the ropes we used kept getting knotted, making the lowering less than smooth. In theory, the first weight would hit the bottom, and then the second and third weight could be lowered in the same way. The current was stronger than expected, and the weights instead anchored the boat, putting a lot of tension on the lines and our arms and hand. Eventually we were able to lower the unit that housed the battery and hard drive that would record the sounds of the surf on Boat Rock for the next two weeks, suspended from the bottom by 2 large buoys attached to a pole. The unit was meant to hang several meters off the bottom, with the buoys submerged at a depth of 5 meters. I sacrificed my arm during the lowering of the unit, to ensure that the sharp edges didn’t pop Beluga’s inflated pontoons. Let’s just say that the placement of my arm was not in the plans, but it worked.

The final step was to ensure that there were no tangles in the line that connected the weights, to the unit, to the buoys. This required a free diver to jump in and swim 15 meters down to check the position of the array in the water column. Of course, this was the job of the unpaid intern, me. I had been watching the water around the buoy before the plunge, and saw swarms of ctenophores (also known as comb jellies, although they are not a true jelly), and salps (a pelagic form of sea squirts, also our closets relative in the invertebrate taxa). Both forms I identified to be non –toxic (their sting is either too weak to feel or not present at all). They were actually quite beautiful to watch under water. I was so tired from the lowering of the weights and array, that I was only able to dive down to 5 meters; but I was able to check that the lined from the buoys to the hydrophones were taught and untangled. I was not able to swim deep enough to check the unit that housed the hard drive and battery, so we couldn’t be certain that the unit was suspended in the water column and not resting on the bottom. However, given the depth of water, Anne was confident that the deployment was a success.

The recorder will set there, in theory, for two weeks and record everything it hears. Her target is to record the sound of surf on rocks, and then play them back from the Beluga in the middle of the migration path of the humpbacks, to test whether they change their behaviour in reaction to the sound of surf (which again could indicate that they navigate using ambient sounds). It will also pick up the song of male humpback whales, which is of interest to several people involved in this census project. In fact the moment we dropped out hydrophone in today, we picked up the song of a humpback not too far away, and listened for about 15 minutes before it stopped singing and probably re-surfaced for air. The song was very interesting, but I was preoccupied with finding an albatross that briefly flew past the bow of the Beluga, most likely a Shy Albatross. I have been seeing several of them from Mt. Olympus, and was excited to be so close to a new species of one of my favourite groups of birds.

Not a bad day, tomorrow back to counting whales. I could really use a beer...