Good news! I am back in Newport for the next 3 weeks!
I got back from Tillamook on Thursday afternoon, just in time to go to Corvallis on Friday morning for the Sea Grant Scholars mid-summer check-in. We got to hear an update from all the other scholars and got a tour of the Salmon disease Lab. I really enjoyed hearing from all the other scholars, especially the ones that aren’t staying at the Hatfield. I also really loved seeing the salmon disease lab, as I have done volunteer work back home with salmon. This lab was way bigger than the one I am used to! I also volunteered at DaVinci Days which was super fun, though at times I felt like I wasn’t completely prepared to explain the multitude of props at the tables. But we made it work, and people really seemed to like the watershed model.

I’m sure you’re dying to hear about my last week in Tillamook after the crazy day we had on Wednesday (see my Misadventures post…). So here we go.

After 7 full days of diving in Tillamook bay over the past 2 weeks we completed 89 sites – almost 20 more than we initially set out to complete. I think this is because the divers we have are extremely efficient and have experience diving in a variety of conditions. Even with a very strong incoming tide, they said it wasn’t a problem to continue working.
Because of our rapid completion of sites, Tony (my mentor, and the project leader) and Stacy decided to add extra points to sample. We went up from 200 sites to ~240 sites to sample for the entire field season. They did this in order to maximize the data we are able to collect with the divers. The way the contract works, we are allowed to dive for a total of 20 days – and that is all. So if we move quickly it is better to use our extra time to sample more sites and get more data.
After the NOAA dive days, the rest of us have also gotten very efficient at setting/pulling anchors and sorting the samples that the divers bring up for us.  One interesting thing about the dives was the diversity of sediment type in the channels. There were spots with lots of broken shell fragments (shell hash), coarse sand, eelgrass, and woody debris. Generally the locations with eelgrass and shell hash had the most amount of clams – we often had 2 full bags of unsorted material plus a bag half full of clams that were hand picked by the divers. The coarse sandy areas had few to no clams, and woody debris generally had a few small clams and crabs. At the end of the day we often had literally hundreds of clams to measure. Fortunately between the 6 of us it would usually take no more than an hour and a half to get them all weighed and measured.

Today we also got to watch a video of the divers working with the dredge from Tillamook. Tony recently bought a wide angle, low-light, underwater video camera to give to the divers so we can watch how they use the dredge equipment and help them fix any problems if necessary. It was really neat to see them pulling all the clams out of the sediment but I can’t imagine how difficult it  must have be to dive down there. Even with the low-light camera it was really murky!

Here’s picture of a bucket full of clams (one day we had about 5 buckets full) and a picture of a bag that had been sorted (notice the red rock crab!).

Now that i’m back in Newport, you would think that we’d be done with this diving stuff. But not so fast! If you think back a few weeks to the NOAA dive, you might recall that we were unable to finish all of our sites. So this week we will be back out in the Yaquina to finish up our work here. After that we will have a few office days to catch up with all the data entry that has stacked up from the last few weeks. And after that is intertidal dredging! But I will have to explain all that in a future post.