Blog from the Sea of Cortez: Electrical woes

Flyer has a unique hybrid system. She can run as a conventional diesel, but she also has two 100 kW motor / generators that can be clutched in, allowing her to run as a pure electric boat. It's truly delightful being in electric mode --- something like a sailboat, with just a light background hum. 

This propulsion trick requires some truly massive batteries --- almost 400 kWh worth (compare to 50-80 kWh for a Tesla model 3). All that power has to run through a set of inverters --- two for the propulsion motors, one for the rest of the boat's electrical loads. Most of the time, the system works great.

But then there are the other times.

Yesterday was one of those times. The inverter used to run the house loads tripped five times in the afternoon until we finally gave up and started up our Bollard 32 kW genset. It's been running since.

We're not sure exactly what the problem is, but we do know that it doesn't like La Paz. I'm not just being flippant: the water here is at least 8°C warmer than in the northern Gulf, where the unit ran for days without any problems. My theory is that there is an airlock in the inverter cooling system, which allows just enough water to get through most of the time, but not enough when the water heats up. Unfortunately, clearing the lock is not a simple matter as the unit has meters of small cooling hoses running through it, all of which have to be independently cleared.

There also seems to be an issue with the hybrid system's many CAN bus connectors.

Right now, we're heading to Agua Verde where we have a busy schedule with local fishing groups and school children. I'm hoping to get a few quiet hours on Monday to take the cooling system apart.

Life on the bleeding edge...

Blog from the Sea of Cortez: Farewall to Safari Voyager!

Western Flyer is licensed by the US Coast Guard as a Research Vessel. That means that, as much as we'd like to, we cannot carry passengers for hire. So, to help pay the cost of our 3 month voyage through the Gulf of California we have partnered with someone who can: Uncruise, an adventure cruise company. 

For the last 10 days their ship, Safari Voyager, a 174 foot, 66 passenger adventure cruise ship, has been shadowing us. Guests have been participating in many of our research activities, such as CTD casts, and intertidal surveys, but then retiring to Voyager for meals and to sleep. In the late afternoons Susan Shillinglaw, one of our board members and a John Steinbeck expert, has been leading the group in reading passages from Log from the Sea of Cortez. 

The results were fantastic. There was something special about reading about an area from the book, say Puerto Refugio, then visiting the actual site with Flyer close at hand. We would compare what Steinbeck and Ricketts saw with what we were seeing. It was also hard not to notice the parallels between the backdrop of war in 1940, to our world today, all of which led to some interesting discussions. 

Take this passage:

We take a tiny colony of soft corals from a rock in a little water world. And that isn’t terribly important to the tide pool. Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging with overlapping scoops, bringing up tons of shrimps, rapidly destroying the species so that it may never come back, and with the species destroying the ecological balance of the whole region. That isn’t very important in the world. And thousands of miles away the great bombs are falling and the stars are not moved thereby. None of it is important or all of it is.

--- Steinbeck, John. The Log from the Sea of Cortez (Penguin Classics) (p. 4). 

Is this the dawn of a new environmental awareness? Or, is it a nihilistic view of the world where evolution grinds on, indifferent to its outcome? Much of the book discusses "non-teleological thinking," the idea that nature has no purpose, it just "is". Man may do foolish things, but there it is.

With such heady topics, it would have been easy for the group to chase down a rabbit hole, but Susan kept things going and on-topic.

I first read Log from the Sea of Cortez as a late teenager. At the time, it read as an adventure story to me, with vivid descriptions of days and nights at sea. With so few years under the belt, the philosophical musings went over my head and I skipped a lot of them. This time, we all slowed down and thought a bit more deeply about the book. I got so much more out of it.

Still confused, but at a higher level.

--- Popular saying around RWS. 

Blog from the Sea of Cortez: Santa Rosalia

Some blog entries just write themself. This is one of them.

This morning, we pulled into Santa Rosalía, and old French mining town. It was founded in 1884, and for 70 years, millions of dollars worth of copper was extracted until the mines played out. After that, they were never profitable, and the town has tried to reinvent itself as a tourist town. 

Of particular pride is the opening of Instituto Tecnológico Superior de Mulegé (ITESME) in 2005. Since then, it has come a long way as a technical college, offering programs in electrics, renewable energy, hospitality, IT, and mining. 

An old steam shovel where it dropped.

The old refractory furnace.

Lots of colorful architecture.

The town was not visited by Steinbeck and Ricketts, probably because they were deterred by the very active smelter at the time and all the smoke it created, but we were eager to visit. One of our board members, Dr. William Gilly, has been to the town many times, and has been working to introduce a marine sciences program at ITESME, so the town already knew about Flyer.

Once again, our local partneers, this time ITESME and Hagamos Más, came through. The welcome the town gave us was humbling. 

The town turned out!

Local Yaqui dancers performing
a traditional dance.

Imagine our astonishment when we were presented with
this model of the Flyer! Even the doors open!

Even more astonishing was the fleet of 70
tiny Flyers, one for each guest.

Me with my little Flyer.

One of the Yaqui dancers in our engine room.

It wasn't too long ago that
Western Flyer looked like this.

Blog from the Sea of Cortez: eDNA

Marine Environmental DNA (eDNA) is the study of the genetic material shed by passing marine life. Once sequenced, a scientist can determine which species were present. 

Previously, the only way to do this would be to send a trained observer overboard in SCUBA gear. Even then, there were limits to how deep a study could be done, and there's always the problem that a human garbed in SCUBA gear, with its Darth Vader-like sounds, could send a shy fish fleeing. By contrast eDNA can see everything at every depth. The tool is so powerful that it frequently indicates the presence of salmonid DNA in the Gulf of California, even though there is none in the area. Where does that DNA come from? I leave it to your imagination. 

However, there are limits. There are millions of species on the planet, but only a fraction have had their genetic material sequenced, so a scientist has to rely on libraries of known genomes. Because many species are very closely related, their genomes may have slight differences, so differentiation down to the species level can be difficult (but frequently unnecessary).

For Leg 2, we have Dr. Adrian Munguia-Vega, an eDNA scientist with an appointment at the University of Arizona. He also has a small lab in La Paz that specializes in genetic population studies. He has been taking eDNA samples everytime we put a CTD package over the side, so we will have genetic information along with basic oceanographic information.

While the technology is incredible, the process is actually a pretty simple one.

Adrian with his Niskin Bottle.
It's used to collect a water sample at a specific depth.

Sterilizing the tools. Without sterilization, the sample
is vulnerable to being contaminated by any passing life,
including humans. It was a windy day, so
a towel was used to shield the butane lighter.

Extracting a single filter sheet.

Putting the sheet in the vacuum extractor.

Pulling a vacuum on the water.
What's left behind is what is sequenced.

We won't know what Adrian will find until he takes the samples back to the lab to be sequenced.

BONUS PICTURE

Flyer at Punta Trinidad in the rarely visited Reserva de la Biosfera El Vizcaíno.
The nearest road is about 40 miles away.

Blog from the Sea of Cortez: Santomar

At the invitation of iAllumbra, we visited a Red Snapper and Totoaba fish hatchery owned and managed by Santomar, located near La Paz.

Totoaba? Isn't that the endangered fish coveted by the Chinese for their swim bladder? The one whose demise has also caused the inevitable extinction of the diminutive porpoise, the Vaquita? Yes, it is. While they are under a lot of pressure in the wild, it turns they are well suited for being grown in a fish farm. The facility we visited, located about 20 minutes away in industrial Pichilingue seemed like an unlikely place for a hatchery, but inside, it is a truly remarkable high-tech place.

Under one roof, the hatchery replicates the entire food chain of Totoaba fingerlings, from algae to copepod. There are hundreds of details that must be mastered. For example, algae is grown under artificial light because the sun would make the water too hot, which would require more energy to cool down than the electricity used by LEDs. Because totoaba only spawns in the spring, the facility needs to mimic all four seasons to ensure a year-round product --- the intensity and duration of sunlight varies accordingly.

Winter season at the hatchery.
Eggs will be harvested from these fish.

Spring. The adults are slightly larger,
and a lot more active. This is the stage at
which the eggs are harvested.

Tanks used to grow the larvae into fry.
The red lights keep the fish calm.

All these details must be mastered, but what matters most is the yield of fingerlings. Once they are moved into the open ocean pens, the process gets a lot more straightforward.

I asked them whether they sell the swim bladder. After all, if the hatchery could put more on the market, that would reduce demand for wild totoaba, reducing pressure on the few remaining as well as the hapless vaquita. Unfortunately, Mexican law doesn't allow them to do that. The law is simple: you cannot sell totoaba swim bladders. Anything more nuanced could create a cover for the already lucrative black market. 

La Paz is a lovely, charming town, but I didn't expect to see something so high-tech in it. I really enjoyed our visit and learned a ton. Thanks to our hosts, Santomar!

 

Blog from the Sea of Cortez: La Paz

Today was our big day in La Paz: Regreso del Western Flyer a La Paz --- an open house for the city of La Paz, celebrating the return of the Flyer after an 85 year absence. The weather forecast promised hot temperatures (90+) with little wind, so we weren't sure how many people would show up. We need not have worried: our local partners had done their jobs. Hundreds of people stood in that hot sun, in some cases for nearly 2 hours, just to have a chance for a quick tour of the boat. 

The "Flyer advertising the Flyer"

To handle that many people we had arranged for about a dozen local high school students to act as bilingual docents. They accepted the job with enthusiasm and even showed up on Friday for a 90 minute crash course on the boat. We simply could not have done the job without them.

Local students Mariana and Daniel
explaining the science program on Flyer.

A hard-earned ice cream after a
hot day wrangling the crowds.

To me, the students made the day not only because of their energy and good cheer, but because it reminded me why we do this. Many of them told me what a fantastic time they had and that it encouraged them to continue their studies. In particular, one young man was toying with a career in electrical engineering, but wasn't sure whether he would be working for money, or because he loved the job. Today convinced him that he could have both.

I think it's safe to say that we left a lot of goodwill behind at a time when both nations need it.

Damn, what a photogenic boat.
Flyer never takes a bad picture.