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. 

We're off!

The weather has died down and we're good to go - so we're off! The transit is just 6 hours to Tracy Arm (yellow pin on the map - we're in Juneau, the red dot at the top left), but once we get there, we'll be out of touch - no internet, no email and no phone, true wilderness, especially in the winter. Once we get back i'll post up how our 4 days of diving went - wish us luck, we have a lot of work to do in a short period of time!

The Gastineau Channel - we'll be headed down here this afternoon!

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.