Day 2 Whales, dolphins and seabirds: Christian Halverson

My alarm is set to 6.45 am and I tend to be half awake most days just a little bit before. What would today entail?

I strolled up to Monkey Bridge, yep an actual place on Investigator, to be met by researchers already hard at bird and whale observations. A couple of species of whales were seen at around 5.30 am this morning. Humpbacks and one with a tall cylindrical blow, too far away but not a humpback. I know that the humpbacks are travelling south to get back to the rich feeding grounds in Antarctica but the other one peaks my curiosity. Fins and blue whales have that sort of blow. I have never seen one, except on TV of course.

Settling in, I make the first blunder of the typical noob:

“There’s a blow off to the right.”

“What?” “Range and Position,” asks the researcher.

“Um, sort of closer to the bow about half way to the horizon.” I try to recover.

“Oh yes, a small pod. Maybe three.”

The researcher kindly takes me through some basic ideas on how to spot and call out. I need to use the bow (front of the ship) as 12 o’clock then think of the whole ship as a clock face, with six o’clock at the stern. It helps too if you say port for left and starboard for right. And, if you use the front mast and the cross bar platform and draw a line out to sea this makes the distance 300 m—300 m will become important throughout the day.

A couple of hours later, we are all rushing around spotting hundreds, if not thousands, of flesh footed shearwaters, more whales and the odd dolphin, gannets and even a small swallow that took interest in the vessel. The researchers take this pretty seriously, of course, and log the observations in a purpose built program on an iPad.

I find out later that 300 m is the width of the transect that we run. Today, we covered maybe 1,000 nautical miles and any bird, mammal, or rubbish that comes within 300 m gets its own record, complete with a selection of behaviors—feeding or diving in the birds’ case, or fin slap and breach, if it is a whale. Anything outside this area is still recorded but not in the same detail.

Chantelle and I rotate a few times throughout the day along with some of the scientists. On my off times, I got to chat with a few of the science staffers about how long they serve onboard and realise that for many they can spend 80 days a year in support of the vessel’s scientists and or equipment. This allows them to rotate different people onshore as well. Most were really looking forward to this transit as most have never really travelled in the northern parts of Australia.

Staff took time to show us the Wet Labs and Dry Labs plus a quick run through the Obs Lab, which I had had a sneak peak at yesterday. I must get to know the characters down there, as this is the display area for all the oceanographic equipment. They are using a sonar system to scan the ocean floor in real time. Yep, making a pretty swish map of all the bumps and lumps that make up our floor on the continental shelf.

Dinner was pretty brilliant again, the chefs know how to look after the rest of the crew. Once replete, we head to the lounge for a more in-depth run down on what the researchers are up to. I realise pretty rapidly that the work that has been done previously was looking at the more southern areas of Australia, and they are welcoming the chance to add to the catalogue and to really start to link oceanographic and biological reasons as to why we get the birds where we get them. No one has done any survey of sea birds in the northern waters since the 1980s. This should turn out to be pretty exciting.