From the backyard to the ocean

It is time to get real and get things wet. The hydrophone and camera array has been sitting in my backyard for few weeks now and it is time to test everything in the ocean!

There are few things I want to know before we start the expedition “for real”. An important one is to see how portable the system is and how easy it is to assemble and deploy it in the field. The goal is to deploy our array at many different places along the coast of British Columbia. So, we need the system to be transportable in a truck or a car and easy to assemble in remote areas. I also want to know if the structure of the array is noisy underwater. If the PVC frame is squeaking whenever there is some current, this would contaminate our measurements and would obviously be a pretty significant issue.

Thanks to my friend John, I got in touch with Ed Wright and Josh Zotzman who work at the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney and were kind enough to let me deploy the array off the Coast Guard dock there. So here we went. Heloise Frouin-Mouy (a bioacoustician at JASCO specialized in pinnipeds, and also my wife as you might have guessed from her name) and Matt Pine (an acoustician colleague at UVic) came along to help me out. The first challenge was to find a way to make everything fit in my car. Let’s say that I don’t really have a big truck, but rather a tiny European-sized car. Nonetheless, after several iterations, we managed to make everything fit! System portability: Check! After a smooth ride to Sidney, we met with Josh and he escorted us to the Coast Guard dock. It took us about an hour to assemble the PVC frame, install the acoustic recorder, and secure the hydrophones and camera. Not bad for a first time! Ease of assembly: Check! Heloise, Josh and I then lowered the array off the dock in about 10 m of water. It took us some time to find out the best way to do this, but at the end it went pretty smoothly. Few things on the frame need to be modified to make the deployment easier, but overall the PVC frame was sturdy enough to handle the deployment. It is always stressful to put all this electronics in the water… Even if I had double checked everything several times, there is always the worry of having forgotten something. Did I close the pressure case of the camera properly? Wait… did I put the waterproof plug back on? Once we left the dock, I just couldn’t stop looking at all the pictures we took and zoom in on every single detail to check that everything was ok. I spent so much time designing and building this array that I really didn’t want to find everything flooded.

We came back the next day to retrieve the instrument and everything worked fine! The camera worked great, so did the acoustic recorder. That was a relief. We even had the privilege to have a small group of harbor porpoise come say hello. I listened to the acoustic recordings and apart from few crabs chomping away at the legs of the structure, the PVC frame did not generate much noise. Quiet frame: check!

This test deployment was successful, and I am very excited to have everything together and working. I am dealing with some administrative/permitting paperwork right now, but very soon this expedition will be underway! We will finally be able to deploy the array off Victoria and start our fish sound cataloging effort. I can’t wait!