Monday July 19, 2010

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We woke up at the crack of dawn and headed to the marina. I am starting to get way to used to gorgeous sunrises. This morning we had a clear sky with brightly colored clouds hanging low over the mountains and islands. It really is a gorgeous way to start the day. I was driving and we headed quickly down to the river. At the river we got into spotting position and after about an hour or so we still hadn’t seen anything. Daniele was starting to get a bit worried until we saw two separate groups of humpback dolphins. That was nice, but a bit worrisome because normally when the humpbacks are around, the snubfins aren’t. The good thing about seeing the humpbacks is that they were really close to the boat. This will make it easier when we have to get samples of them later in the season. About an hour later we hit jackpot and found a group of 15+ snubfins by snubfin point. We stayed with them for quite a while and Daniele was able to get his 3 remaining samples quickly. After the three samples, Alvaro took a few sound recordings. He then did his first pinger experiment. Those experiments involving dropping a small device into the water. The device is quiet for a few minutes then starts emitting high frequency pings of sound in different intervals. After a while we noticed that the dolphins had all but disappeared which basically means the experiment went well. The pingers in the future will be used to attempt to reduce dolphin bycatch by the fisheries industries. Alvaro is trying to help the fishermen by keeping the dolphins away and allowing them to continue to fish while keeping the dolphins safe.
After the pinger experiment we continued on driving and found our same pod later on. Daniele tried to get more samples, but by this point the dolphins had had enough with us and were very evasive. Also, around this time I had given Alvaro my point and shoot camera to try and get a video of Daniele sampling. Needless to say that was not how it was used and soon enough we were ‘filming’ for a dangerous research show similar to the shows of fishers on the Discovery channel. It was something that kept us all smiling for a bit. Daniele wanted to head to the Keppel Islands for an afternoon off because we hit all of our goals, but we could see that it was raining on the islands so we continued on. By the time we got home we had seen a few more pods of dolphins, but none were friendly and we got only a few pictures and maybe one or two sound recording for Alvaro.
So do you remember how I was talking about the contest between the guys and girls on who could see the most dolphins before Daniele goes away to the conference? Well, feel free to call me Eagle Eye. At this point girls vs. guys turned into the muses vs. the gods and the gods lost miserably. The score at the end of the day was 9 to 5 all thanks to little old me. We might be going out tomorrow and Tuesday, but chances are the weather won’t be good to us, and if so Amanda and I just won ourselves some pizza.
We were off the water by 3 and soon after getting home I took a nap and slept right through till dinner again. Being out on the water searching for dolphins all day really is exhausting and I am looking forward to a day off. Tomorrow Daniele said we are going to have a day off, so it will be nice to sleep in a bit. We have to catch up on all of the data entry, so that will keep me busy for most of the day.

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