This past Wednesday DEQ was able to get the boat around Naftan Point and into Laolao Bay for our delayed station cleaning. The team that headed out to the pylon for the cleaning included myself, John Iguel, Ryan Okano and Jose Quan. We were also fortunate to have John Tomczuk from NOAA SEA Team join us. He was on Saipan assisting with the Jurisdictional Capacity Assessment being conducted by NOAA-CRCP and we decided to take him out with us. Tom was instrumental in supporting the CNMI and AOMLs decision in getting us the CREWS station. The least we could do was take him on some dives.[This update posted by Mike Jankulak.]
Most everything got accomplished at the station, save for the PacIOOS tasks (more on that later). We successfully attached the groundtruth CT to the station for a hour prior to the cleaning. During that time we completed one of MMTs long-term monitoring sites in the bay. Highlights from that dive included a handful of octopuses on the transect line!
When we returned to the station for the cleaning we took photos before and after and all instruments/cables seem to be in good shape. The chains of the station are starting to get a fair amount of Pocillopora sp. corals growing on it. Once they get bigger I'll be able to ID them for everyone ;) After cleaning the station we left the groundtruth sensor on for another hour before removing it and heading back to the dock.
Work on the PacIOOS sensors wasn't able to be completed because 1) I didn't see Gordon's email until the morning we went out (backed up email inbox from all of my May traveling) and 2) we could not find a multimeter to use to check the voltage of the sensor. This will be a high priority task for MMT during the first week of July. Gordon, please contact me if there are any updates or changes to what you'd like us to do.
This log is a description of site surveys, station log maintenance, and biological observations at Laolao Bay, Saipan, at approximately 15° 09' 24.4" N, 145° 46' 10.6" W.
Sunday, June 23, 2013
June CREWS Station Cleaning
The following update was provided by Steven Johnson, DEQ/Saipan, by email on June 22nd. It describes a monthly CREWS maintenance visit that took place on Wednesday, June 19th, 2013. The data record shows that the "groundtruth" CT was connected to the station shortly after 10am local time and removed at about 3:30pm local time, for a total connection time of about 5h18m. Steven writes: