Falcon50 vs. Gulf Stream

I am writing this on board our flight to Palmyra. After not being able to land in 2014 because of rain, I will only be completely relaxed when we have actually landed.

There are three additional passengers on our flight besides the Stanford group.  Sarah is an environmental engineer who is volunteering with TNC and will be looking at the marsh that was established many years ago to handle waste water treatment on Palmyra. She is going to be on the island for 3 months. Jarrett is coming out to train as the diving safety officer and boat captain.  He will be flying back with us in two and a half weeks to return in the fall for a 3 month stint. The third person is Theran who is coming out just for the day. He is flying out to look at the WiFi internet set up. He will return in the fall to upgrade the system to provide an increased bandwidth.

I have to say the Gulf Stream jets I flew the previous trips we more spacious and luxurious than the Falcon50. Of course part of the issue is we are bringing LOTS of cargo and this plane probably has less cargo space. On my past flights all our gear fit in the cargo hold except maybe a few bags that were stored in the very large bathroom area. We only had our personal backpacks with us in the cabin of the Gulf Streams. On this flight we had a lot of gear in the plane's cabin as you can see from the photo below. Compare this to photos on the blog entries for my previous two trips.

Falcon50 with seven passengers + one empty seat and lots of gear

On our way

Tim picked me up at 3 am, and we headed to the airport shuttle bus stop driving through the deserted streets of PG and Monterey.

It really is a small world. The driver of the shuttle has a relative that worked for The Nature Conservancy, and one of the passengers said his sister worked on Palmyra. It turns out his sister is Chelsea Wood, a former HMS graduate student who I helped track down historic photos of Palmyra for her research and also helped her obtain lots of books on parasites.

I am composing this on the plane, and realize I forgot to take a photo of the ice chest I used as my checked bag. I wanted a photo just in case it got lost.  I was too wrapped up re-packing it in order to get Tim's checked bag below the 50 lb weight limit.

LATER TODAY.

Tim and I made it to Hawaii with all our gear and met up with Ana who had arrived earlier on a flight from LAX.  After grabbing some lunch, we are in our hotel's business center waiting for our room to be cleaned.

ice chest that went with checked luggage along with my carry-on bag

We get to "sleep-in" tomorrow compared to today. Our shuttle picks us up at 6 am to leave for Signature Air where we will load all our gear and then wait to hear from the station manager on Palmyra for his weather report so we know when to depart. Last time, you may remember, it was raining so hard we couldn't land.

Packing for 3 am departure

I am busy packing for my 3 am pick-up tomorrow morning. Tim and I are taking the 3:30 am airport shuttle from Monterey to SFO for our 7:30 am flight to Honolulu. The good news is we both got TSA Pre-check, so we don't have to undress and un-pack everything to go through security screening.

Packing for Palmyra is always a challenge. First and foremost are the weight restrictions for the flight from Honolulu to Palmyra. In the past we flew on Gulf Stream jets, but the new contract The Nature Conservancy negotiated has us flying on a Falcon50. The Gulf Stream is a two engine private plane while the Falcon50 has a third jet in the tail in addition to the ones on the wings. The other difference is the Falcon50 holds a slightly smaller number of passengers. While the interior is luxurious compared to most first class accommodations on commercial flights, there is no room for large carry-on bags. You are restricted to a small backpack weighing no more than 10 lbs. My backpack will have things like my passport, laptop computer, iPad, underwater & terrestrial camera, critical papers, etc.

items going in my backpack not including my laptop

For my carry-on I am packing a lot of items that would be difficult to replace should my checked bag get lost. It includes cameras for the microscope and photo stand, a GoPro camera for filming fish interacting with the settlement tiles in situ, various cables, batteries, an external hard drive for backup, data sheets, some personal dive gear, and a minimal amount of clothes. You don't need much in the way of clothes since the staff does your laundry for you daily except on Sunday. I live in swim trunks and t-shirts on Palmyra. The weight limit for "personal gear" is 30 lbs.

items going in my carry-on bag

Fish & Wildlife has been beefing up the biohazard protocols to prevent foreign seeds and insects from invading the atoll. Clothes worn on Cooper Island where the marine station is located must be washed in hot water, dried with high heat, packed in zip-lock bags and then frozen for 48 hours. If you want to go on any of the other island, you must have brand new clothes, shoes, backpack, etc. that are placed in zip-lock bags and frozen for 48 hours.

This year I am bringing more gear than I did in 2014, and we will also be bringing back all the settlement tiles with us on our return flights. Therefore, my checked bag this year is a large ice chest. Our original plan was to use the generator room on Palmyra to dry our settlement tiles before placing them in individual zip-lock bags, wrapping them in bubble-wrap, and then stacking them in ice chests. The problem was Palmyra has gone "green" using solar and wind to power the island the majority of the time. The generator serves as backup and is used infrequently. This is a good thing, but it meant we had to come up with an alternate plan to dry the tiles. There is an old, non-functioning freezer that we are planning to use in combination with either heat lamps or a space heater. Those are some of the things that are going in the ice chest. We are allowed 25 lbs of "additional gear".

items going in a large ice chest

I will be re-packing everything once I am in Hawaii as the risks are different for the two flights. The risk on the flight from SFO to HNL is having the bag lost and not found until the next day which is too late since I will already have left for Palmyra. I put things in the ice chest that, should it get lost, could potentially be replaced with a mad shopping spree in the half day we have in Waikiki. However, that carry-on bag with all the fragile gear has to go in the cargo hold on the flight the next morning on the Falcon50 since there is no overhead storage in the plane's cabin. Here there is no risk of the luggage getting lost. Rather the concern is damage to the fragile equipment. So some things will come out of the ice chest and go in my soft-sided carry-on to make room in the ice chest for cameras, etc.

The 2016 Stanford Team

Last year Fio Micheli was schedule to lead our team on Palmyra Atoll. When the trip fell through and we had to postpone our trip a year, Fio was not able to work the new dates into her busy schedule. I am bummed as I was looking forward to spending time with her in the field and letting her assume the role of lead scientist. That said, I have a very experienced pair of graduate students that will accompany me when we leave a little over a month from now.

Ana Guerra has been to Palmyra several times. As a Stanford undergraduate she travelled to the atoll to help with a Hopkins graduate student's project before obtaining her own funding to return to Palmyra and conduct her own project studying the vulnerable bristle-thighed curlew.

bristle-thighed curlew on Palmyra Atoll
Numenius tahitiensis

During my 2014 stint on Palmyra Ana was there too, working on a project tagging manta rays. After that she spent a year diving around the world as the 2014 North American Rolex Scholar which included a two week stint serving as the acting refuge manager on Palmyra. Read more about Ana's adventurous life on her web page:

http://www.anasofiaguerra.com/#!about-me/zl55c

This fall Ana will start as a graduate student in Doug McCauley's lab at UC Santa Barbara. For those of you who have been following this blog, you might remember that Doug is one of the PIs on this project and was the lead scientist during my first field season on Palmyra in 2013.

The second member of the team is Tim White. Tim is a graduate student in the De Leo & Micheli labs at Hopkins Marine Station and another avid diver with experience working on Palmyra Atoll. But what impressed me most was when I heard him talk about the time he spend on Teraina also known at Washington Island. A barge dropped him off on this tiny atoll where there were only few people who spoke a bit of English. There was no communication to the outside world, and Tim just had to hope the barge returned in three months. He was there to study shark-finning practices. If you want to read more about this fascinating story, check out an interview he did at:

http://protecttheoceans.org/wordpress/?p=1598

Tim White building his own shelter on Washington Island

Tim is hoping to do some of his Ph.D. research on Palmyra and is off to a good start with some preliminary funding to study coconut crabs on Palmyra while we are out there this summer.

Palmyra reef suffered in 2015

While the Stanford team failed to make it out to Palmyra as planned during the summer of 2015, the reef suffered two major hits. First there was a major storm that did physical damage to the reef. It will be interesting to see how our settlement tiles fared. There is a chance we might get a look at them before we are on site if Scripps is able to create the photomosaic from the photos it took of the reef after the storm event. It would be nice to know ahead of time what we will be facing.

Below is an example of a large table top coral that is vulnerable to storm damage.  I wonder how many of these have been toppled?

table top coral
Acropora cytherea

The second hit the reef suffered was a coral bleaching event that was the result of high water temperatures brought on by the El Nino. The good news here is the reef has been recovering from the bleaching. To see some before and after photos of bleached corals that have recovered a year later, check out the following URL:

http://sandinlab.ucsd.edu/2016/06/01/palmyra-atoll-bleaching-update-may-2016/

Counting sharks on Palmyra Atoll

A new paper just came out using dual-frequency identification sonar to track sharks as they enter and exit the Palmyra lagoon using the channel cut through the reef by the U.S. Navy during World War II. While only one of the authors, Fio Micheli, is currently from Hopkins Marine Station, three of the other four authors who are from UC Santa Barbara have a history with Hopkins and Stanford as students working on Palmyra.

Using military sonar technology, the group was able to document the movement of sharks as they passed through the channel. Over the 443 recorded hours they observed 1,196 sharks with a maximum of 10 sharks appearing in a single frame. There seems to be a shark "rush hour" at dusk with the shark traffic peaking between 7 and 8 pm.

Below are two links with more details about this scientific paper.

http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2016/016952/rush-hour-palmyra-atoll

http://www.livescience.com/55091-sharks-evening-rush-hour-discovered.html

blacktip sharks are the most common species observed in the Palmyra lagoons
Carcharhinus limbatus

A New Blog

If you are looking for something to read until my Palmyra blog starts up again, check out my Baja Librarian blog. Back in April I participated on a research trip diving off the Pacific side of the Baja peninsula. The link to this blog can be found in the list of my other blogs to the right of this blog entry.