What We're Doing

So, in case you're trying to get up to date with the plot for this season:

The Pacific cod stock in the Gulf of Alaska, which had previously supported a very important fishery, suddenly crashed last year. Available data point to the effects of the 2014-2016 marine heatwave in the North Pacific. This heatwave, in turn, was, according to our best scientific understanding, partly the result of human-caused changes to the atmosphere. The evidence is that you just can't get the North Pacific as warm as it was under the pre-industrial climate.

Remember those good old days when global warming impacts were the concern of the future?

I have been working as an adjunct research professor at the Fisheries Department, College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, University of Alaska, for a year now.

Yes, it is as glamorous as it sounds. :)

Basically, my job is to identify meaningful research questions having to do with Alaskan ecosystems and fisheries, and then to secure outside funding to support that research.

After the cod collapse there has been tremendous interest in getting a handle on whether the stock will recover. That entails better understanding of the factors affecting survival in the youngest cod - the ones less than a year old.

So that's where we come in. Alisa and I are both biologists with a background in nearshore ecosystems in the Gulf of Alaska. Alisa in particular is a real expert in the sometimes hard to identify juvenile fishes that live in the nearshore, including juvenile cod and their various cousins.

So we secured funding to conduct a pilot study of those less-than-a-year-old cod in the western Gulf of Alaska this year, from Galactic.

Our sailboat is slower than a commercial fishing boat or private research vessel that might typically be chartered for this kind of work. But we are also waaay cheaper. So we're able, for a reasonable cost, to spend a couple months traveling out west along the coasts of Kodiak and the Alaska Peninsula, and then back again, sampling the cod population in every little bay we stop in.

So far we've visited ten bays and sampled 56 sites with our little net that we set from the skiff and haul into the beach by hand. Tomorrow we set sail for the storied cod port of Sand Point, in the Shumagin Islands. We hope to sample two or three more bays in the Shumagins before we turn around and start heading home, re-sampling our sites on the return trip.

What our days look like in the actuality is, either, me in the cockpit in the rain, conning the barky to the next bay, while Alisa works in the galley at keeping everyone's morale up, or enters data on the computer, or reads to the boys, who otherwise mostly lounge around reading comic books, OR, the whole family, at some deserted anchorage, all of us in neoprene waders and rain jackets and life jackets and lots of warm clothes, driving the skiff up to a beach, hallooing for bears and keeping an eye out for net-snagging rocks.

We have completely given up on having much in terms of decent weather for this summer. But otherwise we're having the time of our lives.

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This post was sent via our high-frequency radio as we're far from internet range. Pictures to follow when we reach internet again. We can't respond to comments for now, though we do see them all!

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Weather Day

We're tough and all, but there comes a limit. No one here is in that high-tolerance 15-45 age bracket, after all.

Today in Mitrofania Bay, Alaska Peninsula, The Great Land, Planet Earth, it rained. Sideways. It blew southeast, that crappiest direction of all in the Gulf of Alaska. When it was tired doing anything else, it misted and fogged.

The low tide was in the afternoon today, so we had plenty of opportunity to sit inside next to the diesel heater and contemplate the damp and chilly things that were going on on the other side of the perspex portlights before we could go out and sample.

Cooler heads prevailed, and I am glad they did. We decided to put off the sampling until tomorrow, which by the simple law of averages stands to be less harrowing than today.

Elias fished from deck, brave lad. The rest of us ventured out not at all. Eric executed an admirable set of Lord of the Rings drawings from memories that must go back to the last time we read the trilogy, at least two years ago. Alisa read long chapters from the series that she and the boys are enjoying so much. Something about mice with swords. And I got the simple joy of simply working on a couple of science papers all the day long.

It's a funny sort of delight, a weather day. By the end of it you inevitably feel a little pasty and overdone. But what a straightforward delight, this time spent with just the four of us, all day long, sharing the saloon of the Mothership, our cozy floating home. I stepped outside the moment and marveled - look! Elias at 11, and Eric at 8! How sweet they were, how uncomplicated and delightful! I felt myself stomping on time's arrow and savoring this simple day in their lives, and my life that becomes more and more about them, just as their life will become less and less about me.
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This post was sent via our high-frequency radio as we're far from internet range. Pictures to follow when we reach internet again. We can't respond to comments for now, though we do see them all!

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Fast

You haven't worked up a beach seine set FAST until you've done one while simultaneously: 1) the tide is rising and threatening to inundate the little scrap of beach you're working on; and 2) a sow brown bear and her two cubs are foraging on the tidal flats about 400 meters away.

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We're now in our third anchorage on the Alaska Peninsula, Kujulik Bay. We had a ripper run down from Port Wrangell this morning, making 63 miles in ten hours, which while not remarkable under sail, is very good for us under power.

The Peninsula has shown us some new patterns in the fish communities, including sets that are strongly dominated by juvenile Pacific cod and - news flash - hundreds and hundreds of juvenile pollock in some instances, which we don't normally associate with the very nearshore.

Elias also found a clump of bear fur on some salmonberry thorns while we were hiking, we continue to feast on dolly varden, and we saw our first purely continental mammals today - ground squirrels. The lessons of island biogeography, and the paucity of species on Kodiak, are brought home to the boys.

Oh, yes, and fin whales. Lots and lots of fin whales, at least by a modern perspective.

~~
This post was sent via our high-frequency radio as we're far from internet range. Pictures to follow when we reach internet again. We can't respond to comments for now, though we do see them all!

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