It's wetter here, and snowier, than anywhere else in the country right now.
There's a dynamite picture of Glines Canyon just before the dam was built on the Dam Removal Blog.
We may try to be optimistic about the Elwha, but overall, the state of Washington's watersheds is poor, and there are fewer and fewer fish.
It keeps raining. Not a whole lot of precipitation, here; but it keeps happening; and not a whole lot of sun breaks and horizon clearings in between. But sometimes...
Precipitation, yes, all up and down the west coast, and across the Northwest. Look at all that blue, yeah?
But on the whole, it's too warm for the snowpack to be building. The Olympics and the Sierras are doing ok for snow-pack (after a couple of bad seasons for the Sierras), but the Cascades are looking scary.
Fresh Drought Monitor maps(1)(2) will come out on December 6. So we don't have to look at that bad news right this minute.
Last night there was a sea urchin nearly sitting on the lens of OrcaLab's underwater camera at Cracroft Point.
At dusk he (they come in male and female genders, but all on-camera sea urchins are called 'Spikey Guy' or 'Spike', depending on who is posting about them to OL's community page) began to wander off camera, and was gone by the time they turned the camera off. But this morning he was back in the same spot.
Hurricane Isaac's wet progress through the middle of the country did make a difference. But outside of the storm's track, things have gotten a little worse.
The U.S. Drought Monitor is produced in partnership between the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the United States Department of Agriculture, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Map courtesy of NDMC-UNL. Thank-you to all.
Friday morning we did the monthly COASST survey for beached birds at Hobuck Beach. It was a quiet, partly cloudy day. There were a lot of people on the beach. Of live birds we had 2 eagles along the highway, posing nobly at the tops of trees as if they were wood sculptures; a great blue heron in the Wa'atch River; least and western sandpipers, semi-palmated plovers, a whimbrel. And of course gulls.
It was not a notably low tide, but so much sand has shifted in over the past month that the beach is wide and flat and seems to go out forever, a true summer beach profile. There was a kelp dragon.
Being out with people who know things is an endless delight. Now I know how to distinguish male from female crabs by the underside of their shells.
There were four of us, and five dead birds to work. Two gulls which were re-finds, already tagged last month (and not the more full of information for being a month more deteriorated). A baby cormorant, still in down. And two rhinoceros auklets, the first of which was so freshly dead it was soft, intact, very much itself still.
HP found some olive shells (Olivella biplicata). The Makah use them for regalia, so HP gave them to SP, our Makah teammate; who accepted them and gave them back to her, to pass on as a birthday gift. A small formal moment; careful hands, purple shells still wet and shining. Giving, returning, passing on.
The village of Neah Bay was hopping with people, boats, floats; gearing up for Makah Days over the weekend. We left HP at the trailer which the Marine Sanctuary maintains on the Coast Guard Base in Neah Bay, to get ready to set up the Sanctuary's educational booth for the event. JL and I stopped for a late lunch in Clallam Bay. There was a deer swimming in the Strait. Half the patrons of the diner went out across the highway to get a better look. When we left, the deer was ashore, sitting unmoving on the beach. We hoped it would recoup enough energy to move up the beach as the tide came in...
Just for the record, people see summer-resident gray whales sometimes in Clallam Bay, but of course we didn't.
To Salt Creek with PB. It was blue out.
What we have around here are semidiurnal mixed tides, "two high and two low tides of different size every lunar day". What we had going for us at Salt Creek yesterday was the higher low tide, barely going down to three feet above mean lower low water
and I suspect the little island remains an island at that tide level— but we can't testify, because we were sitting at the kitchen table talking until much later than low tide, and as you know the tide does not wait for you. It was rising noticably when we got there, and kept rising. For sure the little island was an island, and a bit of sand reaching towards it went under the gentle blue waves as we stood on it.
Tongue Point, where the tidepools are, was under the waves; there were children, and sandpipers, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca was about as blue as you could wish for.
The sunset time (here) is another two minutes earlier every day this week. Thank you to the US Naval Observatory for the Sun or Moon Rise/Set Table for One Year generator.
It appears that I had a 'the walls are closing in' daylight-shrink panic, and checked the table, last year on nearly the same date.
There will be darkness.
O noes.
It's overcast down here, one of those mornings where the webcam on Hurricane Ridge shows us exACTly where the ceiling is:
This morning, for the second day in a row, OrcaLive has its camera down in the kelp forest under the waters of Johnstone Strait at Cracroft Point. Yesterday there were close sea urchin manifestations, many fish, and a lot of delighted watchers— who up until five years ago took the opportunity to hang around with their heads under the sea all summer for granted, and were thrilled, thrilled I say, to be able to be there again. To stay current with how OrcaLab is proceeding with the experiment in bringing back their cameras, keep your eye on the community page.
So I went wandering about just now hoping to find enough webcams to confirm it is overcast at the moment all the way from here to there (it is) and found a really extensive BC webcam page, which found me the view of Victoria harbor from the top of the Royal BC Museum (whee) and a jillion other nice places to visit.
As to nice places to visit, the Brown Bear & Salmon Cam is offline until next summer sometime; there isn't a marmot cam, alas, and the new marmot blog hasn't been updated since early in the season, alas alas.
A sensible woman would go out to the ocean today.
OK, then, perhaps I shall. After I stick my head back under the sea and watch the kelp waving around for a while longer...
Hobuck Beach on the Makah Reservation. We think the weather was supposed to turn good in town; but out here, gray and quiet.
It's the monthly beached seabird survey for COASST. The dead-birds birder team is large this time, seven people. The tide is low and the beach is wide, but with so many people we can cover the whole thing in one pass. It's a long drive (2 hours) and we got a late start. We were on the beach for four hours and the tide seemed really really low the whole time, which is basically not possible, but there you are. For live birds, we saw whimbrels, killdeer, plover, gulls lots of gulls. Heard eagles, never saw them.
We had seven (dead) birds to work, not too hard to deal with when the recorder, the measurer, the photographer and the person wielding the ID book are four different people. Two fork-tailed storm petrels. A baby gull still in down except where his new flight feathers were just coming in. A large immature gull. A sooty shearwater, a northern fulmar (dark morph) and a Cassin's auklet. We had our bird mentor MSB with us or we'd NEVER had gotten the second petrel, he was just a delicate handful of bones; but yeah, a sufficiency of measurable parts when you looked: beak, tarsus, barely visible foot details.
The beach was very clean. SP, who is Makah, says the tribe is doing a tsunami debris survey every Friday, and they are evidently also picking up trash. Hobuck accumulates trash as readily as it does dead birds, so it was surprising to see it so pristine. There were a LOT of people out, surfers, kayakers, stand-up paddlers.
As I said, the beach was clean. Mostly there was only styrofoam, probably left by last night's high tide. We started picking it up on our way back. For the last 500 yards of the return leg, the protocol calls for a marine debris survey, in which you count about one pageful of possible debris categories (and only pick up as you are up for it). This has been being done for about 11 years, a considerable baseline record. But now there is an extremely demanding new tsunami-debris survey which is being developed, which is to cover only 100 yards as far as possible from the beach access and in which you walk a narrow grid, and pick up and tally everything. The seven of us huddled to discuss and discuss what it means, what we should do. It seemed obvious to me that it made no sense WHATSOEVER to do a tsunami debris survey on a beach which had already been cleared and tallied end to end by the Makah Tribe; and that the new protocol must go back to NOAA, to the OCNMS office, for further refinement. Plus everyone was far too tired to trudge back to the further end of the beach, and the first time they field tested the new protocol it had taken four hours... (I was tired and getting crabby. I removed myself from the discussion and ambled to the vicinity of our starting point, read a book. Took a soundscape for Cee.) In the end, the rest of the crew used the old marine debris protocol, listing only this and that, picking up what they could.
SP took the sacks of trash to put into the tribe's designated marine-debris dumpsters at Hobuck Campground. The rest of us adjourned to the Marina bathrooms in Neah Bay, to wash up, so that we dared eat our lunches. We're fairly cavalier about whether or not we put on gloves as we handle the dead birds, but it's sort of like the 5-second rule: you know when the ick factor has been exceeded, and then you need to wash or disinfect.
The sunset will get eight minutes later over the next two weeks (and the sunrise two minutes earlier); but really, it's near enough as light as it gets.
Thank you, United States Naval Observatory. Table of Sunrise/Sunset, Moonrise/Moonset, or Twilight Times for an Entire Year.
The first thing you need to know is that the Thompson (2)(3) is big, and she sails in the service of Big Science.
The science team who had the use of her for these 48 hours—from University of Washington's Applied Physics Lab, doing Oceanography (at an operating cost of $30,000 per day)("Data is expensive," said our chief scientist, Jan Newton)— didn't waste a minute of it. I'm pretty sure some of the younger members of the team, those who were about a third my age, never went to bed at all. Maybe had an hour or two of a lie-down between CTD samples the second night.
The ship's crew also worked all the time, but by watches. Presumably they slept. Presumably we made life difficult for the cooks, as we would turn up very-nearly-late for meals if we were taking samples from the CTD rosette during the meal hour, or sitting talking when they were trying to clean up the tables. (Is this the place to mention that the food was fabulous, and the whole ship's crew generous and cheerful-spirited?) The captain was on the back deck whenever something important was going on, his eye every minute on safety. Many of us were newbies to the ship, which made the ship's safety officers nervous.
Thompson is bigger than the usual craft heading out through the ship canal and Chittenden Locks. Attracted attention all along the way, kids in playgrounds calling out 'Look at the big ship,' the park visitors at the Locks taking pictures of us as we took pictures of them. Three bridges had to be raised for us, not counting the railroad bridge west of the Locks which is usually up but happened to have trains crossing as we were in the Lock.
OK then, we are on our way, watching Puget Sound pass by, watching the weather clear :-) We three Observers from the Sanctuary led a parallel life, neither crew nor yet exactly science team. The work will take place inside the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, so the Sanctuary was invited to send some volunteers to further the educational aspect of its mission, and there we are. We sailed, we sailed, we sailed. SG and I spent a chunk of the afternoon watching the scenery go by from a forward facing area on the bow, two levels up from the Main Deck, two or three levels below the bridge, while JW talked to crew and science team guys about machinery and riggings and engines.
The science team worked on finishing preparations to launch Chábă and the subsurface profiling buoy Nemo-subsurface, preparing electronics and physical connections; the CTD part of the team ready their lab equipment. Somewhere along Admiralty Inlet, between Whidby Island and maybe Marrowstone Island, SG and I have our only marine mammal sighting: two sea lions hanging out on a navigation buoy to the east of the channel. (JW saw a humpback fluke up in the middle of the night.) We round the corner into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, sailing in the outbound lane on the Canadian side of the Strait; to starboard is now Vancouver Island; to port, our own familiar coast. We pass Port Angeles, we keep heading west. JW calls his family in Clallam Bay when we are passing there.
After dinner, Jan (the chief scientist) offers us Observers from the Sanctuary a quick class in the science of what we are actually going to be doing out there. JW and SG are both school teachers; I'm just me: COASST volunteer, database volunteer for OCNMS, humble handmaiden of the Muse of Science. She goes to the whiteboard and draws us the coastline and the currents, the ocean layers, coriolis force and upwelling and the mixing of nutrients and dead zones and where adicification gets in the story. We ask questions and take notes feverishly, for all the good it does now when I try to give it back to you. You can read a bit about it in the NANOOS (Northwest Association of Networked Ocean Observing Systems) newsletter.
At sunset we are still heading west. We have not yet reached Cape Flattery and turned south when darkness slowly falls, and I go to bed for a while. We are going to arrive at our target position, and the actual work of placing the two moorings will start, some time after 1AM.
I spent a ridiculous amount of time in stairways like the one below, choosing doors. If I chose correctly, I knew how to get where I was going. Usually. If I chose wrong or broke pattern at all, soon I'd be turned completely around. What worked best was to find my way back to the Main Lab ('Clean and Safe Science' it said on the wall in the corridor, as opposed to the wet lab, the computer lab, the bio-analytic lab, etc etc.; but at least one doorway so labeled in the passageway did NOT lead back to where I could know where I was and thus could start over).
All three of us observers recounted the same experience the first time we lay down in our bunk and turned off the light: finding ourselves in a steel box one level down below the nearest door to the skin of the ship, in complete dark. 'Uh-oh, this is NOT going to work,' we each thought. But once eyes adjusted, we could see just enough light coming through the louvered ventilation grating at the bottom of the door. Oh. OK. (SG left the light by her sink on all night.)
Little film clip inside the berth. Note the safety equipment right there. NOT telling you about how well I did not do at getting into my Gumby suit during the safety drill. I failed Safety 101 completely. Had to send myself to my room for a while.
About 1 o'clock, the ship arrived in position, inside the Marine Sanctuary, west of La Push in Quileute territory. They dropped the CTD rosette, which samples the water at specified depths by closing doors on the tubes, called niskin bottles. Immediately afterwards the other part of the science team started putting Chábă in the water. (I slept through this. SG was up at two, but probably doesn't have pictures either, as she by then had a science role, she was a chlorophyll sample-bottle filler-upper.) When I got up at 4:30, Chábă's upper buoy was afloat, [See the diagrams here:]
Meanwhile, the other part of the science crew prepared the CTD rosette for its next drop, and down it went as soon as ChaBa's bottom weights were put on and the final line released.
Small video, our water samples rise swinging from the sea...
On it goes. The ship repositions slightly, and the subsurface mooring is emplaced. Diagram for the subsurface mooring, the other half of Nemo.
More CTD samples, more crane and chain and cable work. I am trying to be a water sampler, so have no pictures of the second mooring going in the water either. I'm sorry to report that I also fail at Water Sampling 101. I am just the old lady who was so tired that she wasn't competent to collect water samples in the proper order into the correct numbered plastic bottles from the correct tubes, and kept dropping the sample bottles and having to rinse them three times with water from said tube all over again. The youngest and most energetic of the science team, who was 'sample cop' and telling all four samplers which tube to sample into which bottle, and checking off when they are done on the master checklist, took over from me after everyone else was done, so we could ever get finished. I sent myself to bed for a while.
Then the ship begins 6 or so hours of mapping the seabottom, with a sensor on the bottom end of a long pole called an 'overboarding pole' running down the side of the ship and into the water. Meanwhile the science team adjourns either to computer screens to start examining the new incoming data, or to the lab benches. Of our four kinds of water samples taken in several spots and from 24 depths, the oxygen and chlorophyll analyses have to be done before we leave the ship. The bottles for nutrient and Co2 testing are frozen and will be shipped to a lab. Yaay for outsourcing.
Small video, in The BioAnalytic Lab.
We sail north. Our next CTD drop will be at sunset off Cape Flattery, in a couldn't-be-better scenic spot.
Meanwhile, there is no action on the rear deck for us Observers from the Sanctuary to be in the way of. We drag three chairs out from the Staging Bay (and why are there chairs there unless for this purpose?) and turn the Thompson into our own private cruise ship. Except that nobody came by to offer piña coladas, it was perfect.
Ready to drop, again.
Scenery takes over. There we are off Cape Flattery and close enough to see the lighthouse on Tatoosh Island with our eyes. The weather continues perfect.
We round the corner into the Strait, and find ourselves in the shipping lane with really big ships: suddenly R/V Thompson isn't big anymore. Vancouver Island to port, Neah Bay and the rest of our own familiar coast to starboard. The sun sets. The science team is going to take samples, and run the ones that have to be run, all night.
I trudged back up the stairs at 4:30 AM to find us stopped in the middle of the Strait, exactly off home,
Port Angeles' lights still twinkling in the twilight, the Olympics in their familiar profile as seen so many times from the ferry, Mount Baker on the eastern horizon, and Victoria on the other shore.
We have to get out of the way of the crew, they are readying the decks for our arrival.
The Victoria pilot boat brings us our pilot.
We cruise right past Esquimalt Lagoon from the Strait side (!!), and into the harbor.
Past the Canadian Forces Base.
And dock. Instantly we are history. The next leg of Thompson's itinerary belongs to the Canadians. They will be servicing the Neptune underwater network with ROPOS (Remotely Operated Platform for Ocean Sciences), and their cruise will last a month. The minute the customs guy came aboard to meet with the captain and examine our passports (the captain had them all), the big crane on the dock started bringing in ROPOS' containers.
They are calling their expedition Wiring the Abyss 2012 and their website is very slick. Well yeah. Neptune is really REALLY big science. Their science team will be 38 on board. They tweet as @nc_operations
We have a group photo, wait for our passports; and then we three Observers for the Sanctuary are first off the ship. We have a ferry to catch. We hustle along the pier, up the hill to the guard post.
The security guard kindly calls a taxi for us, and we are rushed off to the ferry terminal, just in time make the 10:30 AM run of the Coho.
Home again, 58 hours after I left, having been on two ships, and in two countries, and out to sea.
PS. Found on Jan's profile page, finally, what NEMO is an acronym for (besides being the Jules Verne reference that it is): Northwest Enhanced Moored Observatory. The description says it "consists of a heavily-instrumented real-time surface mooring (Cha Ba), a real-time subsurface profiling mooring (NEMO-Subsurface) and a Seaglider to collect spatial information, aims to improve our understanding of complex physical, chemical and biological processes on the largely un-sampled Washington shelf." And leads in turn to a lovely web page. Um... Jan, did I miss entirely the deployment of a Seaglider, or what??
PS. I absolutely can't see why the ship's track graphics, nor the other couple of photos I inserted late last night, won't embiggen. All the others do. If I figure it out, will repair.
