Some of the NOAA owned video from the Tracy Arm Red Tree Coral site!

We're back!

We finished up 3 days of very successful diving at 3pm on thursday and sailed to Taku harbor to overnight, 2 hours from Juneau but before the Taku inlet, a notoriously windy area. Our last day was extremely windy, 50mph gusts in the fjord, along with freezing spray, made for a cold last day of diving and a bumpy ride home. The project was a great success, we've returned with all our tagged coral colonies sampled, lots of macro images and four live colonies to keep in tanks at the Auke Bay Laboratory to look for spawning. A busy, but fun, three days of diving. 

We awoke in the protected Taku harbor yesterday morning to a tsunami warning. Just 2ft in our area, but as we got closer to Juneau we heard news of just how devastating the earthquake and tsunami have been in Japan, and our thoughts go out to all those affected. 

Still windy

This is a photo of the NOAA sub port in downtown Juneau, and this is right where our boat should be today. However all we can see is the wind whipping up the water into whirligigs instead. The good news is hopefully the boat will leave Petersberg sometime this evening and go through the night (when the wind is predicted to die down), so we might actually get back on schedule to leave on Monday. However it goes, we're all standing by, Christian gets in from Hawaii tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon we'll take all our gear down to the dock to wait.

Today I did my checkout dive off the Auke Bay pier and all went well, we even saw some mating King Crabs! The visibility was wonderful (20ft +) and there was lots to see - anemones, sea stars, urchins, mussels - the seafloor was teaming with life. A good sign of what we'll see in Tracy Arm!

Second Sampling!

Good luck to Bob and Jennifer, out right now on the Alaskan Legend doing the second sampling effort of this project. They have a lot of tasks, so hopefully it'll all get done!

Aloha
Dr. W.

More Pictures

Sawyer Glacier at the end of Tracy Arm. 

See all the little black dots on the ice floes in front of the glacier.....

Well, they're all harbor seals! 

Jen and Bob ready to dive. They did 3 dives a day for 4 straight days, pretty amazing as the conditions were very challenging! 

The drop off site at low tide. The tides here are crazy - 14 feet was an average for our stay! 

Wade and I tender for the divers. While the divers are in the water we would sit in the zodiac and watch the bubbles making sure they didn't get into trouble. When the water is this cold, as soon as the divers come up you want to get them out of the water, so it's important to stay close and pay attention to what might be happening underwater. 

We also did a CTD cast at the site and out in the outer fjord to look at the environmental conditions of the water - salinity, temperature and dissolved oxygen. 

The lab, looking much more "used" after 4 days of non stop processing! 

Cataloguing is an important part of any science project. Here Bob takes video of all the colonies that were collected to look at for damage effects. I'll put up a good summary of the work and products in the next few days. 

We were never the only ones in the fjords either - here a large cruise ship overtakes us in the morning, taking tourists to look at the spectacular glacier. 

Heading out at the end of day 5. 

Spectacular sunset on our last night. We anchored just outside Tracy Arm for our final night, a little closer to Juneau so we could get going early in the morning, as this boat can't run at night. 

A treat on the way home - dozens of humpbacks feeding and playing! 

Four of the humpbacks. 

Getting going

I'm not an experienced SCUBA diver by any means, but when this project came up, and then got funded, the excitement began to build. As i've discovered though, not everyone is as excited as me at the chance to jump into 5C water in Alaska. Up until a few months ago too i'd racked up the grand total of 6 dives in my entire life, all in the warm waters of Hawaii, so getting prepared to even be allowed to get into the frigid Alaskan water has been a time consuming process.

1. Get dry suit certification
2. Get more practice with dry suit
3. Get advanced open water certification
4. Get more dives in

The first two are done, and to a degree so is #4 too. I'm now up to 15 dives total, four of those in a dry suit, so i'm feeling more prepared. I'll talk more about the differences between wet suits and dry suits later, but be assured, it's a whole different ball game. Number 3 i'm dealing with this weekend, so thats good too!

So what is next on the list?

1. Organize logistics (flights, hotels)
2. Send chemicals to Alaska
3. Make sure all the equipment will be available on the ship
4. Get to Alaska

This project is going to be tagged onto my travel to Glacier Bay National Park for a project up there in a few weeks, so it means being extra organized up front and early. By stay in touch, exciting things happening in the next few weeks!

Dr W.