Cadboro Bay – deployment

​Our first deployment site is in Cadboro Bay, close to the University of Victoria. We picked this site because sculpins have been seen there and also because this is a sheltered site. For the first deployment we didn’t really want to go straight in the open ocean. Baby steps.

So, on Monday, Jess Qualley (manager of the Juanes lab and skipper), Katie Inness (Juanes lab assistant), Tristan and I went onboard the M/V Liber Ero to deploy the hydrophone array. The weather was cooperating, and everything went pretty smoothly. One of the challenges was to find out how to fit the array on the tiny boat. It was tight, but we made it work. For this first deployment, we chose to have a surface buoy for the recovery, just to be safe. This might cause some noise if there are big waves, but at this point in the mission we just wanted to make sure we could retrieve the instruments easily. We’ll get braver in a few deployments, once we gain more experience and confidence.

Once everything was deployed, we put the Trident ROV in the water to make sure the array was sitting properly on the seabed. It was only the second time using the Trident (the first time in the ocean). It was neat and reassuring to be able to inspect the array once deployed.

The instruments will stay in the water for 4 days before we come back to pick everything up.