The Polaris

The Polaris at dockside.

At 100' long, the Polaris is the largest ship I've ever been on for research. She is an old cruiser yacht that was donated many years back to the USGS and which they now use to sample in the San Francisco Bay. As I understand, it's the oldest boat still in service that's owned by the federal government. The boat was plush in its day and is still very comfortable. She sleeps 13, has a kitchen as well as tv/dvd and loads upon loads of science equipment.

San Francisco Skyline

Golden Gate Bridge

We left early Tuesday morning and toured the South Bay, Central Bay and North Bay to Rio Vista, which is almost 2 hours drive from San Francisco. We slept on the boat at the dock in Rio Vista and on Wednesday returned via the same route. I got great views of Alcatraz, the Golden Gate bridge and downtown San Francisco.

This device was lowered to collect water quality data from water at the bottom and at intervals throughout the water column.

Val and Tim sluicing clams from a benthic grab sample. They're collecting data on benthic fauna to relate to changes in water quality in the bay.

In Rio Vista we went to a bar called Foster's, whose claim to fame is the largest collection of stuffed prey in the US. From baboons, gazelle and lions to moose, bear and even a chipmunk, this guy has shot it all. The collection was from the '20s and '30s so you can imagine they looked pretty worn. There must have been 300 mounted heads on the wall.  No pics though, I left my camera on the boat.

And my personal highlight of this trip was the bathrooms aboard the Polaris. Because of the polluted San Francisco Bay, ships are required to store or burn refuse, no dumping allowed. (pun anyone?) The Polaris used a fairly common ship toilet that combusts deposits using high-powered electrical coils that are vented to the outside. The system works well with one drawback. Anytime the toilet was used the invisible smoke puffed out above deck and anyone who was not below caught a good whiff of burning carbon. With two toilets and 13 aboard, this happened quite often. Luckily, I mostly worked in the cabin and had to tolerate the stench seldomly.

The Fire Toilet with lemonade for demonstration purposes. The white paper liner is required for both liquid and solid deposits in order for the burn to succeed.

The Fire Toilet's button, pretty self-explanatory.

The Fire Toilet in action. The doors only open briefly and I was afraid I might drop the camera so this one's a little fuzzy. Then poof, Fire in the Hole!

Fires in southern Cal

Check out the fires in southern California. This picture was taken by a friend from her backyard!

Endless calibration

While the machine is getting great peaks and separation of peaks, we still have not been able to get the numbers to work out. It's going slowly and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that our endless calibration runs finally work out.

Whitewater again :)

Just picked up a kayak. The wavesport Y with the beautiful Captain America color scheme. The boat's well-used and the previous owner padded the cockpit to the extreme. It's snug with street clothes; I'll probably have to shave some of it down for use with a wetsuit. I'm excited to try it out on the water, alas, all my kayaking gear is back home in Cor Vegas.

Samples, First Round

Machine results:
Carbon, nitrogen and sulfur samples all look good at medium concentrations. We're still working to calibrate the machine and that should be finished later this afternoon in time to start a real sample run that will actually produce numbers rather than just let us know if we've met threshold values.

Then it's time for happy hour!

San Francisco, Ho!

Just arrived in the bay area to hopefully run every last sample I need for my thesis work. So far, so good. We have the machine up and running at the moment and the calibration standards are looking good. Real samples are set to run later today and will indicate how the rest of my month down here will turn out. Fingers crossed ;)

Kayakin' on the North Santiam

A couple weeks old but still memorable. Some highlights of the N. Santiam trip:

1 Combat roll!

2 Combat roll #2 executed during celebration of combat roll #1 as kayak entered nasty hole backwards as I faced upstream whooping with my paddle over my head...

3 Humble pie eaten when I biffed it on an easy eddy-line I'd just crossed and could NOT roll back up, had to swim to shore.

The trip was awesome. Everyone learned something and the improvements we made as a group between this trip and the previous were astounding.