Monthly Archives: May 2014

FOER Trip

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Light to Moderate Easterly winds. Periods of heavy rain. Force 2-3.
Barometer is on the rise. The forecast is for West wind tomorrow.

Tour boas: 5
Other boats: 3 recreational fisherman transited the reserve

I saw two Canada goose goslings today, the first hatchlings of the season. I still don’t know what nest they came from, but I think it must be from a super sneaky nest that I hadn’t been able to find. Another group of Canada geese arrived along with a single White Fronted goose. The Elephant seals are still camped out in front of the Keeper’s House. Several seals spent much of the day in the shallows next to the jetty. Maybe it was because of the rainy weather, but by the end of the day all the seals were all piled up together. I think they separate from each other when it gets hot. The Eagles are out in force and actively pursuing Gulls. We watched an Eagle chase a Gull (with black under wings?) for a couple minutes, the Gull got away. That same Eagle took a dive for the Canada goose goslings. There were lots of Guillemots in the reserve today, but no sign of the Cormorants.

Chris dropped off Garry Fletcher along with the ‘Friends of Ecological Reserves’ trip for several hours today.

April Seawater Sampling Data

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Fisheries
and Ocean Institute of Ocean Sciences
Daily Seawater
Temperature and Density Record Shore Station
Time Zone: PDT
Station Race  Rocks  Lightstation
Month: March Year: 2014
ObserverLester B. Pearson  College  of  the  Pacific
Date Time Sea

Temp.

°C

 Jar

Temp.

°C

 Hydro-  meter   No. Observed Density YSI Salinity YSI Temp °C
1 1625 31.1 8.6
2 1940 31.1 8.6
3 2105 31.1 8.3
4 2236 30.9 8.5
5 x x x
6 x x x
7 x x x
8 x x x
9 x x x
10 1038 8.9 9.5 10,802 240.0000 29.5 8.6
11 1205 29.5 8.8
12 1340 30.8 8.9
13 1334 30.8 9.3
14 1445 30.3 9.0
15 1552 30.5 9.0
16 1630 30.6 8.7
17 1955 30.9 8.6
18 2135 31.1 8.6
19 2215 31.5 8.5
20 x x x
21 x x x
22 x x x
23 0700 31.3 8.5
24 0930 31.1 8.9
25 1055 31.2 8.7
26 1236 31.2 9.1
27 1344 31.4 8.7
28 1520 31.2 9.2
29 1740 31.3 9.2
30 1923 31.1 9.3
31
Mean*

 

 

Making water with sunlight

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Light Easterly wind. Clear skies. Force 1.
The barometer is still falling, but no bad weather yet. It is supposed to blow in overnight.

The Steller Sea lions are now all on the East side of Middle Rocks. There are about 10 California Sea lions around the jetty. It was a hot day for the Elephant seals. All of them except Scabby-molt went down to the water at some point. Scabby-molt just splashed in a nasty puddle for a while. The littlest seal spent some time lying in the shade by the Tank Shed.

I was told when I started out here that you have to run the generator when the desalinator is on, otherwise you draw down the battery banks to potentially fatal levels. However, last month the generator shut down without me noticing and the desal unit ran for another hour and a half with no problems. So today I decided to test running the desalinator without the generator. I made sure the PV panels were clean and turned on the desalinator at 1100. I checked it at 1115 and 1130, and every half hour after that until 1530. It ran no problem, with a good charge on the battery bank. The lowest voltage reading was 51.6V and the highest was 54.0V (bare minimum charge is 48V, we don’t usually go above 56.0V). So i was able to do 4.5 hrs of water production (~400 litres) off of sunlight. The success of this test is good news, because it means that on a clear day with 14 hours of daylight we can run our highest drawing appliance and still get the island through the night just off of the PV panels. I’ll have to try it out on a cloudy day, and it might need to be monitored closely on shorter days. But it means that we are closer to our energy sustainability goals than we thought.

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