Benjamin crosses Salt Creek

Well it has been a little while since i have posted...mostly due to crazy car troubles and the like- but this does not mean that I have been away from REU fun, no no, far from it! Last week we went out to Salt Creek to sample a few off-channel habitats with the old semi reliable rowboat. As can be seen above, John was kind enough to let me strike a noble pose as we made our way to the sample area. What is not evident from the photograph is that we forgot to put the plug into the boat (happens more often than one would think) and as a result, my interpretation of Benjamin crossing Salt Creek became Benjamin floundering in Salt Creek.

As it turned out, the second site of the day (Pished- like fished but with a P) yielded the most fish I have ever seen in one haul off the shore. A rough estimate put numbers of forage fish at the thousands (~4,500 anchovies, 2,500 surf smelt, 2,000 herring + dozens of other fish fauna). unfortunately, the sheer numbers of this haul made it difficult to capture on camera, so your best bet would be to go watch Finding Nemo- in particular the part where Nemo encourages, like, a million anchovies to escape the clutches of the evil humans, mu ha ha ha ha. In any case, the day certainly gave me hope of restoring some ecologically fit systems to the Straight, and a provided a re-justification of the importance of our work.

Whale'r of a Tale

A few days ago we went out on the WDFW Whaler, for myself the first time on the Straight of Juan de Fuca. It was a beautiful day on the straight, and as we left the harbor, the sea seemed smooth and welcoming. We snapped pictures and, of all the best news, I was given a job! As luck would have it, I have been given a job that requires i spend 20 hours a week out on the great blue nothing saving the environment I love. Yah, I could do that.

With this in mind we sped off to the Dungeness watershed near shore. Once there, the surf proved very tough, made tougher by the incredible drag produced by our dry suits in the current. To make a long and mostly tiresome (in experience and for me, the telling) story short, the drag, the overheating and the sea-sickness nearly proved too much for us. In the end, no more dry suits off the whaler, and one very very sore Charlie horse.

Sometimes It's Sink AND Swim

Well, as it turns out, not all dry suits are created equal, and if there was any question of this, the video, seen below (omg the technology!) will put any rumors to rest.

Today, I went out with Melanie, John and Jenna (all on the WDFW REU project) with a simple goal: swimming in line through a kelp bed, and counting fish with the aid of a snorkel, flippers and dry suit. In the Biz, this is referred to as a snorkel survey. For myself, the similarities between the description of a snorkel survey and my experience on the 4th of October sorta ended there!

Preparation was fairly easy:
1) get snorkel
2) get working dry suit
3) count fish

- too bad I couldn't quite fulfill number two. So there I was, swimming out to count fish when I suddenly felt as if some very cold, wet noodles were slithering down my back to pool like a mess of pasta at my feet. So I thought to myself: "Great the suit leeks a little, I guess I should'a checked this thing a bit more carefully". As I continued to swim out to the kelp bed, looking like nothing so much as a bright-red wallowing sea lion, I find that there is a school of smelt 15 feet below me, estimated at maybe 50 fish or so. As time elapses, the noodles are turning into ropes, but I am determined to finish my transect- and besides, now I am immersed in the kelp beds. For those of you who have never snorkeled with a failing dry suit in the middle of a North Pacific bull kelp bed, let me elaborate: A kelp bed is similar to a forest, in fact, many notable people whom I cannot name actually call them kelp forests, but I digress. This kelp bed-forest moves with its own breeze, which is actually the movement of the tide as it moves to and fro. Bull kelp, species Nereocyctis luetkeana, is the fastest growing species of sea-weed in the world and provides essential habitat for different forage fish such as smelt, herring, perch and occasionally salmon. This is the plant that you have probably found washed up on long beach and the like, looking so much like a strange, slime drenched tentacle from a bad B movie. In any case, a forest of this is not exactly smooth swimming, and I found that it was becoming more and more difficult to make headway through this forest of grasping tentacles. I was now about 3/4 done with my outbound transect, when I noticed that my fins, that at the beginning of my swim were comfortably just below the water, where now about a foot and a half below the surface. Now. Water weighs about 2.26 lbs for every liter of water, and to loose ~1.5 feet of buoyancy, my suit had to have taken on at least the amount of water that would have been contained in the now full legs of my dry suit. Now I'm no scientist (ok so I am), but that means that, even say there were only 5 liters of air in each leg, I was now carrying 22.5 lbs of water in my "dry" suit. Well, to make a long story short, I decided, to be frank: to hell with the rest of this transect, and got back on shore before I was carrying my own weight in water. In the end, I looked like someone had made my legs out of sausages, whilst my pals all thought it was quite funny... (nothing a little hole punch wouldn't cure he he he.) The moral of this story is: sometimes it's sink or swim, and well, sometimes its sink AND swim.

Hope on the Horizon (or at least on the living expenses)

Well, I have got to say, things are looking up! This Friday I experienced my first taste of what working with a WDFW (that's Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife to the layman) crew is like, and I have got to say, I'm hooked (no pun intended)! This Friday, myself, along with my two roommates, a classmate and WDFW biologist all went out and dragged nets around in the surf and adjacent waters to collect and measure salmon and other marine fish. This is, needless to say, what i would imagine heaven to be like (if my GF was along and there was maybe a computer around). It was great fun to don the full-body wet suit, grab the end of a 50 ft. seine and go frolicking in the waves and water! Not only was it fun to get, it is also essential to the restoration of the Elwah and Dungeness watersheds.

The data we collected on Friday will be interned into a large multi-year database on essential fish habitat and census. This is incredibly significant because it allows for biologist such as Anne Shaffer, our fearless leader, to make very good estimations on what the offshore stocks look like, where habitat is best suited for restoration work, and where work need not be done. With the removal of the Elwah dams in 2012 or so, it is important for us to understand where the fish are maturing, where their major food sources are, and what their competition or predation sources might be. It would be very bad manners to remove the two dams, only to have a mountain of sediment land on some of the most productive bodies of water in the whole watershed! In any case, i loved this Friday and will hopefully be able to continue with WDFW this whole year, though the all powerful $ will probably be the deciding factor, unfortunately. Well, more later, and I hope that everyone who's reading this is having a good day: D