BOWLS Cruise Blog
Days 11 & 12
July 2 & 3, 2014
48° 17' N 124° 09' W
Strait of Juan de Fuca
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After an intensive few days of multiple coring, we are now heading up the Strait of Juan de Fuca for San Juan Island Friday Harbor Labs. Our international team of scientists had the multiple corer humming! We collected 12/12 multiple successful multiple cores (96 tubes) full of mud and wonderful deep-sea mud dwellers across a wide expanse of the ocean in 2.5 days. King Neptune, with is waves and winds, rarely lets us sample the denizens of the deep so efficiently. The cruise has been quite successful, although Neptune did retain two of our precious bone-wood landers at the seafloor, and tore off our trawl net before we could collect any large seafloor invertebrates such as starfish and brittle stars. Sampling the deep sea is always challenging, and usually rewarding.
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We are now steaming up the Strait of Juan de Fuca as the sun sets. At least 20 humpback whales have blown and sounded around our vessel, even though there a number of giant (100-foot long) container vessels with a few miles of us. We have to be careful not to come to close to them, since they are not maneuver poorly and require five miles to stop. As we transit down this busy strait, we here the constant radio chatter of the Canadian Coast Guard from Tofino, advising ships to alter course, beware of nearby vessels, and stay in the correct side of the channel. Nowadays, GPS, radar and other devices make vessel tracking and avoidance fairly easy (barring heavy fog) but a few decades ago navigating this strait must have been nerve racking!
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We all can’t wait for our landfall tomorrow in Friday Harbor. As Chief Scientist, I look forward to rewarding the outstanding had work and buoyant spirits of our scientific team with a lunch ashore, on dry, stable land. As a grandfather, I look forward to greeting my 3-year old granddaughter Mila on the dock. She is in love with ships and the ocean, and may be become part of next generation of oceanographers. If so, she will be amazed by the beauty and adventure of the ocean, the endless range of motions and sounds of a vessel crossing the heaving ocean, and the unique comradery developed among the scientists and ship’s crew on a long research cruise. Every cruise has a different suite of people, whose characters blossom into combinations of friendships and adventure never to be experienced again. I am always very happy to return shore and to see my loved ones after a cruise, but also feel a sense of loss for that I will never experience the same combination of hard work, laughter and companionship again.
Craig R. Smith
Chief Scientist
University of Hawaii at Manoa
End of the Blog.
Last updated: 07/04/2014