currenttidings2025-1
Current Tidings
Shannon Point Marine Center
Volume 2025, Issue 1
This spring marked one of the busiest in the history of the Shannon Point Marine Center. Over one 60-day period, our captains made 58 trips, serving 346 passengers, and our scientific diver and safe boating training programs are going strong. Growth of WWU’s Marine and Coastal Science (MACS) program has brought new equipment and new opportunities to the lab. In this issue, we see first-hand the impact a new and novel course is having on our understanding of our local marine waters and on the learning experiences of our marine science students.
By Mira Lutz, Marine and Coastal Science Marine Technologist
The student lab at Shannon Point Marine Center (SPMC) is abuzz with excitement. Young scholars from the Marine and Coastal Science (MACS) program’s newest course pour over instructions. Without a cue from the instructor, students open packages like they are much-anticipated gifts, communicating with one another, finding highly engineered parts that fit together and tools to connect them.
“We need a 30-foot pound torque wrench, not a 15,” says MACS student, Jim Johnson, already a skilled marine mechanic from work on a research dredge. We all want to ensure the $13,000 pole mount and its even more expensive acoustic instruments can be secured safely to the boat.
The course is Ocean Observation and Instrumentation and its designers, marine geologist Emily Roland and physical oceanographer Sam Kastner, are placing students at the helm of the discovery experience. From day one, students are designing studies that explore marine topics they care deeply about and assembling high-tech instruments with which they will acquire data. Student engagement could not be higher.
SPMC staff support the assembly process, offering tools, printing instructions, and drilling holes for the mount in the boat’s gunwale (a counterintuitive activity for vessel captains, I must admit). Roland and Kastner want their students to complete their MACS major knowing how to use ocean-observing instruments but also prepared to act as chief scientists and collaborators. As the marine technologist, I am in the lucky position of supporting this endeavor and operating the boat for the surveys, so I get to learn alongside the students, and, as it will turn out, become highly invested in their research outcomes.
Once the multibeam sonar is installed on SPMC’s RV Magister, the system is ready for calibration and a test run. R2 Sonic’s representative and former Navy hydrographer, Patrick Nissen, is here from Maryland to guide the process. Measurements by Roland, Nissen, and students permit the instrument to determine its exact position. I move the boat in figure-eight patterns to activate the sonar program, then repeatedly over a large boulder, to correct for roll, pitch, and yaw. Calibration tests show that the measurements and math were spot on – we are ready for research.
Spencer Jurado and Jim Johnson lead the first survey to determine whether beds of sea pens, bright orange cnidarians, can be detected by sonar. This would be much more efficient than mapping the beds by scuba, as Jurado did last summer during his SPMC scientific diving course. But are these fluid-filled animals dense enough to reflect sound? There is doubt on board, including from the highly experienced R2 Sonic hydrographer.
As we start recording, a trail of colors appears on the monitor, indicating water depth by hue. The sonar emits sound impulses, creating a fan shape of sound that bounces off the seafloor, returning an image of what is there. Discouragement builds as I move the boat over the area where the beds should be. We can’t see them. Hope is not lost, though. The data can be cleaned of “noise” back at the lab. We will have to wait for results.
On the next trip, Finn Raker and Phoenix Hogaboom use the sonar to search for a geologic fault line that may continue from land into the seabed off Guemes Island. The fault line that is clear on the east end of the Island on land disappears on the seafloor. We will wait for cleaned data here, as well.
Rachel Strober, Melanie McCoy, and Alyssa Coleman use the multibeam to map an eelgrass meadow near Cypress Island. After successful runs over the bed, they lower an underwater camera to confirm what they are seeing on the screen and are rewarded (“Oh my GOSH, eelgrass! Look a nudibranch!”). The data are good.
A partner team of Kaitlin Ringwood, Lexi Whitlock and Ela Hancock deploys another instrument in the same meadow, a Nortek acoustic doppler current profiler (ADCP) to visualize patterns of water flow in the eelgrass. Rapid pings from the instrument bounce off particles in the water and return a sound wave that translate the sound return into profiles showing different water velocities as shades of blue or red. The information the students gather inside and outside the bed can help us understand how eelgrass reduces shoreline erosion, which is valuable in restoration efforts.
The following week brings us under the iconic Deception Pass bridge. Measuring current profiles here could present special challenges. In fact, the student researchers learn that the very strong flows through the pass create vibrations that interfere with the sensitive measurements of the ADCP. They have to move just outside the pass to make measurements. Documenting flows directly under the bridge will require a different approach.
Marine mammal aficionados may wonder whether adding sonar and ACDP sound to the sea hurts our southern resident killer whales and other marine neighbors. Marine mammalogist, Dr. Cindy Elliser of Pacific Mammal Research (PacMam) and a literature review indicate that sound in the high frequencies used by these instruments is above the range marine mammals hear, a suggestion that is supported when a group of harbor porpoises visit the boat during one of our instrument deployments.
With the research cruises complete, the students analyze their data and share it in a much-anticipated poster session on the Bellingham campus. I learn that by cleaning the sea pen data with the Qimera data processing program, Jurado and Johnson revealed the sea pen patches – right where the divers had found them before. Hogaboom and Raker could not find the fault line, likely due to sedimentation, and want to return at a higher tide to extend their search shoreward. The eelgrass team shared their map and data showing decreased current flow within the bed with the Washington Department of Natural Resources. And Deception Pass has its first current profiles, but not in the swift current inside the pass. For that, well, we’re going to need a bigger boat.
Every project produced meaningful results and inspired future use of these instruments for ocean problem-solving. In fact, Jim Johnson will return this summer with the multibeam sonar to locate and remove derelict crab pots. Those are some rainbows we can’t wait to paint.
This MACS course inspired the type of engagement that has far-reaching results. As Rachel Strober, one of the MACS students put it, “Conducting research on our own projects is exhilarating. It’s a whirlwind of excitement, fear, amazement, and surprise as the results appear right in front of our eyes.”
SPMC boat captains are improving safety on the water for staff members of state agencies as well as WWU students and faculty through periodic Motorboat Operator Training courses taught at the lab. Our own Captain Nathan Schwarck in the Vice President of the Scientific Boating Safety Association, which oversees the training program. Students learn navigation “rules of the road,” object and person recovery, tight quarter maneuvering, trailering, launching, and recovering boats, and use of visual distress signals (flares and smoke), among other essential skills.
Generous funding from HF Sinclair added a digital fire extinguisher training system to our courses. This laser-driven trainer provides the ability to practice fighting type A, B, and C fires at different levels of difficulty. This allows us to more effectively train those in our certification programs, giving them more hands-on experience in firefighting aboard vessels, in gear storage areas, and in other interior spaces, all without discharging persistent chemicals or creating difficult-to-clean-up messes. Thank you, HF Sinclair!
