From left to right: Kimberly Wood, Sarah Ashworth, Daniel Webster, Annie Gorgone, Dr. Robin Baird, and Amy Fonarow
I was recently able to do something I’ve wanted to do since forever. I got to spend time on a boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with . . . marine mammal researcher Dr. Robin Baird and his team as they searched for odontocetes (toothed whales, dolphins, and porpoises) off the Kona coast!! How cool is that?
Until recently, I worked in public relations for Hawaii Ocean Project, an ocean excursion company here on Maui that donates to five of the top peer-reviewed and published marine mammal research groups that work in Hawaii. Dr. Robin Baird’s non-profit -- Cascadia Research Collective headquartered in Olympia, Washington -- is one of the five.
Last year, the portion of our company proceeds that went to research totaled $30,000. “Being a scientist is hard,” I always said to people who were considering our tours. “It’s not like the whales are going to pay you, and the usual funding comes from grants, which you have to compete for.”
Robin sent me an e-mail in March, saying he and his team would be in Kona for a 13-day research trip in April, and would I like to join them for a day or two?
I scrambled from my office chair to confer with my boss. He said yes I could go, so I replied to Robin’s e-mail: “Um, let me think. YES, PLEASE!”
Robin sent back a 19-page document he had written detailing the objectives of this research trip, and the protocols that are taken while underway. “There are three primary goals for this project: 1) obtain movement information on pelagic and/or insular false killer whales; 2) obtain movement and diving behavior information from beaked whales and small odontocetes (e.g. Kogia, bottlenose dolphins, melon-headed whales); and 3) document interactions between fishing vessels and pantropical spotted dolphins. There are a number of secondary goals. . .”
His document also detailed the “how to’s” of the inevitable search for marine mammals and seabirds to the potential spotting and photography of them. He discussed proper methods of tagging, retrieving sloughed skin, fecal sampling (opportunistic - I’d wondered, so thought I’d share), exhalation sampling for stress hormone chemistry (isn’t that the coolest thing you’ve ever heard of?), and more.
Scientists involved in different projects had asked CRC to bring back anything they could from Kona that would pertain to their marine research.
One scientist had requested any pilot whale vocalizations that could be picked up by hydrophone. This requires that the boat motors are turned off, the pilot whales swim close enough to the deployed hydrophone to be recorded, and the waters are calm enough to not drown out their voices.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium is doing research on jellyfish, so any jellyfish encounters were to be photographed and recorded also, in writing. (Jellyfish don’t make much noise, anyway.)
I arrived in Kona on the evening of Sunday, April 19th. It was my first landing on the Big Island.
On the plane I was seriously drooling, reading all of Robin’s protocols; “The Voyage of the Mimi” and Cousteau specials hadn’t given this kind of detail.
Robin has been doing research in Hawaii for the last 15 years, and his main species of study is the false killer whale, both insular and pelagic.
Each species of odontocete we could encounter was prioritized in terms of time. As time on the water is limited, and sightings of some animals—say, beaked whales—are extremely rare, any encounter with them would be prolonged as much as possible. A spotted dolphin encounter, on the other hand, “should generally not exceed half an hour.” In my head, I was like, “A half hour! 30 whole possible minutes with spotted dolphins!?!” It was also made clear that some species could be hanging with other species, so to make sure that once you see one, you continue scanning your patch of ocean so as not to miss another.
No matter what actually happened out there, I was reading documents written by a real live scientist, and I had a chance to see false killer whales, spotted dolphins, red-tailed tropic birds . . . sperm whales! I felt overwhelmed, excited, proud to have somehow scored these marine mammal moments in my life, and a little bit seasick.
I wondered what Robin would have me do. I wanted to do it well, whatever it turned out to be.
Hawaii Ocean Project’s whale watching tours are two hours long, and their boats must stay 100 yards away from the whales. Hawaiian humpbacks are considered an endangered species, and when they are off the coast of Maui, they are swimming in National Marine Sanctuary waters. The Hawaiian humpbacks are recovering from whaling quite well—their annual increase in population is seven percent - and so the species may be taken off the Endangered Species List this year.
US research vessels have scientific permits issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service, and so they are permitted to get very close to the animals without being in violation of the Endangered Species Act or the Marine Mammal Protection Act - both US Federal laws.
Robin picked me up from the airport, and I felt instantly welcomed, both by him and the team back at the house. Everyone was sitting around the dinner table, going over the day’s findings.
I learned that Kim was volunteering with Robin. She works for A’o Waianae Tours, another excursion company off Oahu that brings tourists close to the spinner dolphins.
I met Annie Gorgone, who has been working with Robin since 1996. She was one of the sharpshooters of the group, able to biopsy a moving cetacean from a moving boat with a single shot. I remembered her name by thinking “Annie Get Your Gun.”
Daniel Webster has been working with Robin for 16 years, and he does all the tagging. He is based in Montana, and he also tags for Cascadia on the East Coast.
Sarah Ashworth had recently joined up this February after a long stint studying sharks with the University of Southern Mississippi’s Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.
Kim was working on taking data off a hydrophone. The equipment was connected to a laptop, and it had all kinds of files in it. It was hard to tell what was what, but she and I soon sorted it out. When she clicked on a sound file that might contain pilot whale vocalizations, we both leaned close to the laptop speakers, listening hard for what could be a brand new voice from the Pacific. What we heard was “ploop!” so we knew the hydrophone had been deployed, but that was it!
That night, I could barely sleep. We were to leave the harbor at dawn.
“How are your seabirds?” Robin asked me at 5:00 AM, standing in the kitchen.
“Pretty good,” I said, and quickly went back to Cascadia’s list of seabird photographs for a review. “Ah, tern!” I smiled to myself. I like terns.
“Yes,” Robin said. “We saw a tern yesterday. We may see a tern today.”
“Well,” I replied, sipping my tea, “One good tern deserves another.”
“You are a morning person.”
We left the harbor at 6 AM on a 27-foot Whaler with a flying bridge and extend-o-prow (my term, after seeing it in person). I was instructed to be an observer, to look for signs of cetaceans and seabirds from a specific station on board. We were all observers at first, scanning 180 degrees over and back every 10 to 20 seconds; all quadrants were always covered.
There were SO many waves that I thought were dorsal fins at first! I didn’t call anything out until I was SURE I was seeing several humpback blows 200 yards away. These actually turned out to be the spray from the waves hitting the Kona Coast—three miles away.
Eventually, some cetaceans were spotted, and we slowed down and stopped, rocking back and forth. Pilot whales!
I could hear them breathing just off the bow—strong, quick breaths out, without the whistle you hear with a humpback. (That makes sense, as pilot whales have a single blowhole like all toothed whales, but humpbacks - baleen whales - have two nostrils.)
At that moment, it was my job to check the ocean all along the port side, so I kept it up.
“Is this the first time you have seen pilot whales?” Robin asked me.
“Yes,” I said, wanting so badly to look that I was trembling, but continuing to search my swath of ocean for potential conspecifics.
“It’s okay. You can look,” Robin told me.
Some individuals were holding still, right there at the surface! Heftier, darker, and longer as adults than bottlenose dolphins, pilot whales have a very short rostrum (beak), and a melon (forehead) that bulges out a bit over the rostrum. Robin said that it is thought that pilot whales do not stop maturing until they are 36 years old. I was pleased to squirrel away that little fact, as this is my 36th year.
Later on, we encountered a large pod of spotted dolphins - my first time seeing this species, too! The group glided quickly through the water, surfacing and breathing alongside and beyond the boat in all directions. There were adults and at least one calf in the group. I got a few glimpses of a white tip on the end of a rostrum, something I had only seen before in much-admired photographs. Watching the dolphins swim, I was utterly taken with their strength.
One research objective was to tag a spotted dolphin, and when one was pretty close off the bow, Daniel lay down and wrapped himself under and around the Whaler’s extend-o-prow. He reached out and attempted to get a proper line of sight to deploy a tag as we moved through the water, but no dice -- the dolphin shot away.
After we encountered the spotted dolphins, I realized that - despite the ginger capsules I’d taken before boarding - I was seasick. The Beaufort rating at this time was 3. I was pretty embarrassed, and I apologized. “You should have told me you were prone to seasickness,” Robin said. “I myself am.”
I felt silly for having omitted that detail, but I thought if I had said anything about my history of seasickness, I might not be allowed to go on the trip. I had simply hoped it . . . wouldn’t come up.
I ended up sitting with my back to the railing on the open floor of the starboard side, wedged between a cooler and a very clean trash can, nibbling on Saltines and drinking water. I tried to stay out of the way and not look up very much. Everyone was understanding and sympathetic.
Kim wrapped ice in her scarf so I could press it against my face and neck to take my senses off the nausea. “This is the scarf I got in Indonesia,” she told me. “You can puke on it; just don’t lose it, okay?” I didn’t lose it, and the strategy worked wonders.
20 minutes before we returned to the harbor, I suddenly felt fine, so I sat on top of a large cooler and sang some of my favorite sea songs: Jimmy Buffett’s “Hula Girl at Heart,” Sting’s “Why Should I Cry For You?,” “Fathoms Below” from Disney’s “The Little Mermaid,” Billy Joel’s “Storm Front,” and the little bit I knew from John Denver’s “Calypso,” honoring the research vessel and team of Jacques Cousteau. The outboard motors drowned out my voice completely, but I sang sea songs. On an actual research boat. On the actual sea. ☺
We returned to the harbor at 1:45 PM. I thought we must have circled the entire Big Island, but we actually made a rough rectangle of just 134 kilometers traveling north to west to south to east and a little bit north again.
These researchers are hard-working and vigilant every minute on the sea, and there are long stretches where it’s just ocean out there. I was continually impressed by all of them. During the hours I was holed up, there were many seabird encounters, but no other cetaceans showed themselves.
I had scheduled myself to be out on the water for two days, but after that first day, I decided to stay home the following day. I said goodbye to the team the next morning as they packed and drove the van away into the early darkness.
I rested in complete bliss for the entire day.
When everyone got home, I felt like archetypal Mother or Wife. “You’re home!” I cried. “How was it?”
“It was okay,” Kim said, shrugging as she lugged equipment back into the house.
Everyone held onto that assessment for a moment or two, and then:
“Okay, we saw Risso’s dolphins - a group of ten. That species has a really large personal space, so they have to be approached carefully, and we actually tagged one! It’s the first one ever tagged in Hawaii, and it was only the tenth time Risso’s have ever been encountered here by our research group!”
“There is usually one day on a research trip that really makes it, and this was the day!”
“We saw Fraser’s dolphins, a whole pod, over a hundred, and we got photos!” (I hadn’t even heard of Fraser’s dolphins until reading Robin’s protocols.)
“We were able to tag a spotted dolphin, too! The tag ended up on the top of the dorsal fin.”
“We felt really bad that you weren’t there with us.”
As I listened to the day’s recounting, I noticed that one of the team members seemed to be having a shoulder issue. I had worked as a massage therapist for seven years, so I offered to help her work it out. She accepted, and I ended up working with each member of the team for 20 to 30 minutes. Because I wasn’t really available while on the boat but I could help out in this way, I felt perfectly pono about our whole exchange.
As my time with the team came to a close, Robin commented, “Besides the fact that you throw up whenever you’re on the boat, you’re very good company.”
I beamed. And I have since discovered that Dramamine is pretty cool.
Sarah kindly drove me to the airport that evening, and I left Kona in what turned out to be a private Mokulele jet! The pilots came all the way from Kahului with an empty plane just to pick me up for my scheduled flight. Talk about rock star treatment!
Thank you so much Dr. Robin Baird, Annie Gorgone, Daniel Webster, Sarah Ashworth, and Kimberly Wood for welcoming me aboard in a million different ways! ☺ I feel like I returned home with a whole cache of marine jewels that I will delight in for the rest of my life!
And thank you also to my former boss Dave Jung of Hawaii Ocean Project for sending me out to experience a bit of Cascadia Research Collective.
This trip took place in April of 2015. The above was originally published in pieces on my personal Facebook page in June and July of 2015, after being kindly edited by Dr. Robin Baird.