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Dry Tortugas Cruise Day 1 - August 25, 2007
Brett Harrison
At 930 this morning, we departed Key West for the Dry Tortugas. The NOAA ship Nancy Foster had arrived at Key West earlier this morning after a continuous 2½ day transit from her home port of Charleston, South Carolina. Many of the scientists had driven 20 hours to Key West from the Center for Coastal Fisheries and Habitat Research in Beaufort, North Carolina.
During the eight hour steam to our sites in the Dry Tortugas, we unpacked scientific gear on the ship and readied the three small boats that are kept on deck for dive operations. Although storms were on the horizon around the ship during the transit, seas were calm.
loaded with dive gear & ready to go.
Photo by Brett Harrison
Upon our arrival onsite, three of the Nancy Foster’s small boats were deployed off the deck at sites on the south side of Tortugas Bank. These three sites are outside of Dry Tortugas National Park and the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary’s Tortugas Ecological Reserve. Almost every one of the 14 divers in the scientific party dove on shakedown dives. This was an excellent opportunity to test and become familiar with still and video cameras and underwater lights, and to refresh and calibrate fish survey skills. We will have four teams of divers this week, and shakedown dives are a good chance for scientists to rehearse the routine that will be followed underwater on later dives. Water temperature was a balmy 86° F.
Credit: Amy Uhrin
Another dive team observed marine debris on the reef. A ghost trap was seen along with some glass bottles. A ghost trap is a trap that cannot be located or recovered by the fisher because it has become detached from its buoy line and can continue to catch and kill fish. Our study sites had been randomly located at the beginning of the project in 2001 around the edges of Tortugas Banks. These are not recreational or commercial dive sites. The presence of marine debris at these rarely visited sites shows, unfortunately, how ubiquitous marine debris is.
It had been a long day and night operations were brief. John Burke, Amy Uhrin, and David Johnson lowered a video camera off the ship to observe soft sediment communities of algae and Halophila seagrass at several locations on the northern boundary of Fort Jefferson National Park. We are studying the effects of
Brian Degan
We had a great start to our busy week. We have 30 dive sites to fit in, and two were completed this evening. Because our dive sites are fairly deep, ranging in depth from 54–104 feet, divers can get in only a limited number of dives per day. One team of divers stays up to do night operations, which makes for a long day. We are all excited to be aboard the Nancy Foster and think this is going to be a great trip.
