Weather

Wind: At 5H00 coming from West 5 knots. Will be 15 to 25 knots late afternoon                  Sky: Cloudy; Visibility :!0 miles;Sea:calm and flat. After a pretty good day the sky clouded over and rains lashed against the windows

Ecological

For the first time this year the eagles were steady around the Rocks today .We saw them 3 times and 2 at the same time once.So the gulls were pretty excited and maybe also because of the stormy and heavy weather. Yesterday for the census there were not so many pigeons-guillemots but today I could count at least 50 of them.Same thing for gulls Guy counted 120 gulls on North Rock in the evening

So we went to meet Peter Chandler from UVIC for an exchange of the instrument. We got exactly the same instrument but they need to be recalibrate once a year. Lately Peter found that the salinity record that we took were too high ( Probably because of the instrument).

He explained us that an important factor is if there is not enough wind for a season the water become saltier and the salt concentration stays on the surface.

Also actually the weather cycles are still there but we can’t predict them like we used to do it 40 years ago.

We spoke also about the amount of fish in an area :he explained that the phytoplankton grows better in the colder water so the fish follow .We could think because of the warming of the ocean that salmons have disappeared like in 1974 in the South of Vancouver Island but in fact they mainly have changed their migration path to get food and all the species  that get fed on them did too.

Race Rocks station is very important because of its unique situation not in a bay but in the open ocean with a lot of currents all the time . The datas we got (and have been for so many years) are really useful. They give informations that don’t concern a specific area only.