Quick return to Willapa

On return from a conference in Vancouver, I picked up my new crew (John and Valerie) and headed back to Willapa for 2 more days of fieldwork in order to finish this round of data collection. We'll return later in the summer to see how things have changed at all 3 of the sites. Last time, Kate and I didn't make it out to one of the sites - Nemah. This site requires boat transportation, which we coordinated with Brett and Lee for this trip. Taking the boat is alway fun and never for lack of adventure....


We made it out to Nemah way too early the first day. This is always a bit annoying because it means that you could have slept in for another 3o+ minutes. We anchored in the channel and waited for the eelgrass to emerge. With the tide still high you have no idea that an intricate maze of oyster cultivation, rotation and ownership exists beneath you - only an inkling as indicated by the weird tree boughs popping up from the water haphazardly around you. These aren't as random as one would guess, but mark the channels and the different oyster beds.



With two extra hands we finished the work just before the tide flooded the sites. I was very gracious for the extra set of hands as the tides were much worse this week, and we had to hurry to get things done in time. Things weren't too stressful out there though as John and Brett are old hacks at this line of work, and Valerie is an experienced fieldworker, on loan from Universite de Rimouski. She's currently visiting the Lubmenge lab, and was really good natured about yucky fieldwork, most likely because her work involves scraping mussels off of frozen St. Laurence River buoys in the dead of winter!


When the tide starts to bite at our heels we can be assured that Brett's phone will ring. This is always Lee, wondering where the heck we are, as we're suppose to pick him up further up the estuary. Answering a cell phone is very difficult when you are wearing layers of clothing and also trying to drive a boat, not to mention the occasional passing downpour! The winds picked up daily just as it was time to power up-estuary. This slowed us down some, but we managed to cut through the rough chop at high speeds. The knees are a little worse for wear despite my best efforts to absorb the boat bounce with my snowboarder stance.


I'm glad the cell coverage is good out here though, or we may just have missed Lee and Steve before their little oyster hummock went under! (Note: this is not as dangerous as it seems, the water is still quite low and they could have walked home if we didn't show up in time.... I hope!)

Back in town, we stopped for a quick coffee (of course) at Adelaide's before getting ready for the afternoon's eelgrass and algae sorting and packaging extrazaganza. More to come re Adelaide's later this summer when we do our official rating of the Coffee Houses of the Pacific Northwest, but here's a picture of the bookstore adjoining the shop to shop you just how upscale quaint little Ocean Park can be!I have some more good videos, but until I figure out how to upload them faster or cut them down to size I'll wait with those. Until the next trip to Coos....

Kate's Day 7: Newport to Corvallis

We had a quick coffee with Dafne this morning before heading back in the truck and driving inland from Newport to Corvallis. Margot drove me by Hatfield Marine Sciences Centre, where she and Dafne do a bunch of experiments. It is definitely a little bit less remote than BMSC, however, it doesn't have the proximity to rocky intertidal or quite the character of Bamfield!

We viewed one final lighthouse, Yaquinna Bay Historic Lighthouse, which overlooks the entrance to Yaquinna Bay and the bridge over to where Hatfield is located.


Finally, we arrived in Corvallis, dumped our stuff at Margot's really neat house, and came up to Oregon State University to finish weighing samples and so that I could write the blog up while Margs sorted out stuff!

Kate's Day 7: Fieldwork day ?: Netarts Bay to Newport

Fieldwork in the morning was pretty smooth... we were going to rent a boat to access what sounded like a really cool site, but... we were tired so we chose a walk-in site *right* next to the road. After a coffee in the sweet town of Oceanside, which has thsi fantastic view of sea arches, we waited for the tide to go out, and watched the sand beach in the middle of the channel of Netarts Bay fill with clam diggers.

We were just doing random quadrats for counting eelgrass shoots and macroalgae. It was a VERY high density of eelgrass - in one quadrat I counted something like 321 shoots!!

I also found this really cool oyster shell full of the boring sponge, covered in some ophlitaspongia (the red sponge), as well as a couple of tiny opalescent nudibranchs and some brittle stars!! If you really want to see them close, you can click on the picture to zoom in :)

We returned to the campsite to pack up and move out of the yurt, then sat down at a picnic table in the sunshine to measure eelgrass and count macroalgae from the previous day as well as today. It took a long time and I went a little bit crazy part way through and started speaking in a french accent and interjecting french words into everything.





We finally finished, packed everything back into the truck and drove down to Newport where we pulled up in front of Dafne's lovely housesitting abode. I am ready to shirk my duties with my summer job, uproot myself, and move into her bungalow with Darla the dog, to spend the summer in Newport. She is about a block from a huge sandy beach that is perfect for running on, she has the cutest dog to sit for the summer, the house is the ideal lovely beach house, and the part of Newport that she lives in, Nye Beach, is really cute and full of cool people. We took Darla for a walk after making another huge gourmet meal, and stopped into the Cafe Mundo which was hosting an open mic night - looks like a super awesome place to hang out in the evenings.



Unfortunately Dafne and her boyfriend Toshi were out for most of the night at a sailing lesson, and Margot andI were pretty exhausted and not really too sociable, so we had a quick visit and a really good night's sleep.

Kate's Day 6: Stony Point, Washington to Netarts Bay, Oregon

Fieldwork in the morning was at the same site, an hour away from where we were staying. We had decided to pack up all of our things (another reason why that final night in Ocean Park was SO crazy! and probably while I am SO tired right now!) and get the heck out of Dodge right after our fieldwork, so we jammed everything in the truck at 5:30am and drove up to the site, did the work, and hopped back in the truck for a sweet drive down the coast.

On the North side of the Columbia is an oddly named (again, by Lewis and Clark) site called Dismal Nitch.

On the South side of the Columbia is the lovely town Astoria, which I fancied as likely having cheap cute tall wooden houses with a view of the Columbia.

We found another AWESOME cafe!!



and I considered finding work here:

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I forgot to put this in the post from the other day but we watched Michelle Obama speaking on CNN one night and were totally captivated. She's an amazing speaker (makes sense, since she is a successful lawyer). After being down here in the States for a while I feel like I should be walking around with a VOTE OBAMA pin).

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We also stopped in Cannon Beach as we meandered down the Oregon Coast. Known for the giant sea stack called Haystack rock, Cannon Beach is a giant sandy beach with a few awesome bird colonies full of seagulls and Common Murres.


Phalaropes? Haven't had time to ID these with the bird book yet!
I could feel the ocean calling me, so I walked as far as I could (until I realized that it was a pretty scary tide, and giant waves... oh yeah and that there was a hole in my Xtra Toughs - gumboots).
Lots of Guano on that one!

We hopped back in the car and continued down the coast. The road signs down here are kind of funny. Not only are there the crazy Tsunami warning sign, but also crazy ones that just say "DIP".

We next stopped at Cape Meares, which houses a beautiful historic lighthouse, overlooking an awesome Common Murre colony.


This outhouse had the thinnest toilet paper I have ever seen.


We ended up in Netarts Bay at the Cape Lookout State Park. In a YURT!

Kate's Day 5: :Fieldwork Day 3: Stony Point

We had a bit of a drive around Willapa Bay and up towards South Bend, Washington to get to the next site. And an even further stretch of sloggging. It's really quite funny in hindsight, that we get all geared up in long johns, really tall socks, layers of fleece and toques, with chest waders and rain jackets on top. After about 5 minutes of walking through the mud (that reaches up somewhere around the calves) it gets pretty hot, especially in the areas covered by neoprene. Each site was at least 20 minutes if not more like 35 minutes of slogging. I guess the best part was that it was nice to feel warm. Also, I am pretty sure that my legs are well toned from all of the resistance training.
In between grids, the best and fastest way of making sure that the rope grid doesn't get tangled up is to wrap it around one of us!! In the above picture, Margot is walking around with the GPS trying to locate the four corners of the grid. Not so easy, as the GPS isn't accurate enough!
Short Billed Dowitchers!! They were all over the place.

It was REALLY muddy.

We turned up the coast and checked out South Bend, Washington for our coffee stop. Another great wee shop with THE BEST cinnamon buns I have ever had. Sadly that was to be our only break that day as it was approximately an hour to and from the field site and we had a tonnne of samples to process that night.

Kate's Day 4: Fieldwork Day 2: Willapa Bay

After being a little bit too late for the tide the day before, we woke up at 4:30am and arrived at the site as it was still partially flooded. Not entirely knowing how deep some of the channels on the way to the site were, we hung out and watched shore birds and Brants for a while, and enjoyed the sights in the estuary.

We managed to just barely get 3 reference quadrats done before the tide crept up on us. I was madly collecting eelgrass and doing a random quadrat to survey for macroalgae (at each site we tried to get 20 of these done - measuring percent cover and number of eelgrass shoots and then stuffing a ziploc bag full of whatever kinds of drift/attached seaweed was also present in the quadrat).
It was another long day. We grabbed some more coffee, this time at the new coffeeshop in Ocean Park, and returned to the resort whereupon we threw our fieldwork stuff everywhere we possibly could to try to dry it out (after rinsing off as much estuarine mud as possible) , and proceeded to process the samples. More measuring of eelgrass, and then sorting the macroalgae and determining the wet weight of each sample from each quadrat.



Finally it was dinner time and we could put together another gourmet meal; this time was to celebrate cinco de Mayo!! We did our best with some Dos Equis, guacamole and salsa, and burritos!