Day1/Week4

Back to the field. Scott and I left at 8 to meet up with some people from UH to map bathymetry and features with sonar. After an hour or so of setup, Scott set out on a ridiculously rigged kayak. The back had a wooden plank with a trolling motor on one end and the sonar head on the other. A car battery was strapped to the back and a large pelican case with a computer inside was in the middle. This thing wasn’t going to make it through the waves and wind in my area of interest.

The problem that they were having was that the water was too low. So when they were able to get far enough out, the width of the image was fairly narrow. I decided to leave so that I could get some more work done in my area. There is a chance that Ted, one of our coordinators and island locals, will be arranging for a boat to come out tomorrow and take the sonar to my area of study. Although it isn’t necessary, it would be another cool thing to have for my project’s portfolio.

After I left, I decided to snorkel the whole shoreline so that I could take photos and see how the coral communities changed. Even though I had been kayaking twice, I hadn’t seen the coral in detail yet. I was quite surprised to see how much and how often the depth changed. It gave me a good sense of how the communities were arranged and how the water both affected and was affected by the ocean floor surface.

Once I got tired of being scrapped up by coral and found a soft sandy path, I got out of the water and ran into Dr. Becker. He was experimenting with the 200MHz GPR antenna. This thing was big, and not on wheels like the 400MHz one. We did some test along the road shoulder but found that there was a lot of interference including everything from power lines overhead to the eroding sea wall.

It will be a busy day tomorrow if I’m going to try to work with GPR, thermal and sonar data!

Here is a picture of the remotely desktoped computer from the sonar group and Dr. Becker testing the 200MHz GPR.