Pan Pacific Adventure Part 1: Honolulu to Guam

Written by Adam

Tuesday, 23 February 2010

By mid-January the winter situation in the PNW was dire. No new snow, lots of rain, and intermittent ice made for a lot of unhappy snow sliders, myself included. The even sadder thing was that there was no place in the Western US or Canada that was snowy enough to inspire visiting. Perhaps it was time to switch gears altogether, knowing that if I left winter it would almost certainly snow as soon as I left. One day I received a phone call from some friends that work at the NOAA offices in Honolulu. They were organizing a research cruise heading from Honolulu to Guam and wanted me along as a marine mammal scientist. The waters of the Central Pacific are still largely unknown and it was possible we’d find the missing humpback whale breeding ground at Wake Island or the Marianas. Did I want to go? Hell yes!!! The cruise was going to take about 17 days, with about 10 days to Wake Island and another seven from Wake to Guam. I flew out to Honolulu and met the NOAA ship “Oscar Elton Sette” in Pearl Harbor. It’s docked right behind the wreck of the U.S.S. Utah, which was sunk during the Japanese attack of December 7th, 1941. There’s some serious history in this harbor. We headed out to sea under dark and gloomy skies. Humpback whales winter in Hawaii but they spend most of their time close to shore, and there were plenty of them to watch as we sailed off into the nonexistent sunset. By the next morning we’d be past most of them and it was anyone’s guess what we’d find. A day’s work on the Sette involved two hours on, two hours off, from sunrise to sunset. During our on-effort shifts the eight observers onboard would rotate every half hour through four positions on the flying bridge of the ship. The first position was the port side “big eyes”, followed by the center observer/data recorder position, then starboard “big eyes”, then rear observer. When we spotted whales and dolphins we would attempt to identify the species, obtain a group size estimate, and if possible, photograph and biopsy as many individuals as we could. It sounds easy enough but I assure you that each step from finding them onwards can be extremely difficult. It can be a pretty relaxing though. Unlike the first evening of the trip, the next week or so ended up being pretty slow as far as sea life goes. Even the birds were slow, but we did have black-footed albatross and red-footed boobies almost every day. The tropical oceans are aquatic deserts, with little available nutrients to support primary productivity. The weather was also consistently rough, which hampered our ability to visually locate cetaceans. Our sighting rate was pretty low in between Honolulu and Wake, but we did get to see some of the usual suspects, including: Sperm whales False killer whales Wake Island is an extremely remote atoll that was also attacked on December 8th, 1941. It’s now a U.S. Air Force base. We circled around the atoll hoping to find some more humpback whales but unfortunately we were unable to locate any. We did find a trio of Sei whales, which were cooperative enough to allow for photo-identification and biopsy sampling. We also found some pretty stunning surfing potential, but since the majority of the waves here break right onto the coral reef I was content to watch from the safety of our small boat. After we left Wake we had more luck with the Sei whales. Some of them even approached the Sette, but they always seemed to stay just outside of biopsy range. Even so, it pays to be prepared just in case they surface in crossbow range. The weather was always a factor, but we did have one day of calm winds, which allowed us to launch the ship’s small boat to approach animals. This also provided a nice outside perspective of our 224’ home on the high seas. Finally, after over two weeks at sea, we rounded the southern tip of Guam and pulled into the harbor. Solid land at last! Stay tuned for the Pan-Pacific adventure part 2: Small boats in Big Seas!