Hurricane Ian research cruise log: effects on Gulf of Mexico

Album of photos to accompany this post:
I am currently aboard the Florida Institute of Oceanography's research vessel in the Gulf of Mexico off SW Florida. I'm with a team of eight scientists including: Dr. Eric Milbrandt the director of the Sanibel Captiva Conservation Foundation, Florida Gulf Coast University Vester Marine Station research and education coordinator Adam Catasus, FGCU graduate students Robert "Marlin" Smith and Matthew "Cole" Tillman, dive safety officer Calli Johnson, FGCU undergraduate students Gavin Costello, Susannah Cogburn. Also among the passengers on this boat are Wink News (local CBS network) reporter Elizabeth Biro and cameraman Renzo Soriano, plus captains Brian Davis and Hayden Wiley, engineers Grady Smith and Heather Meneses, and most importantly Jordan Adams the chef.

We are doing the un-glamorous job of assessing impacts of Hurricane Ian, and Hurricane-delivered pollution, on water quality and sea bottom life on the "SW Florida shelf" which is the broad expanse of relatively shallow bottom off of the SW Coast of the Florida Peninsula. The cruise began yesterday at FIO headquarters in St. Petersburg. We steamed out of Tampa Bay in the morning and headed south, sampling every "pass" along the way. A pass is an inlet connecting the Gulf of Mexico to inland waters like bays and estuaries. Pollution from the hurricane is likely to be concentrated around the passes as all the gunk dislodged from land pulses out to sea with river discharge and ebbing tides.

The waters were (relatively) clear outside Tampa Bay; we could see the "CTD Rosette" (heavy contraption of water collection bottles and electronic instruments) for two meters or so as we winched it down into the water. Not far south of Tampa Bay, however, we hit browner water, part of the "plume" of discharge from the worst affected parts of Florida we were approaching. In addition to those visual cues, we have tons of instruments running that tell us fairly precisely what the stuff is discoloring the water. We're also taking a huge number of different types of water samples to analyze for pollutants of all sorts, plus nutrients (which may be considered a pollutant), plankton, sediments from the bottom, etc. It's fun with the whole team scrambling to get the heavy instruments deployed and all the samples retrieved and properly filtered, packaged, and stored before the next station. Doing it 4 or 5 times would be a full day. Doing it the approximately 50 times we need to do it is definitely a week's work, and then some.

While the seas were gentle just offshore of Tampa, conditions have deteriorated with the arrival of a cold front's strong, North winds. The worst of it was in the wee hours last night. This heavy, 78' boat is seaworthy, but it was really rocking. Kudos for Dr. Milbrandt for filtering samples and assisting on the wave-washed deck all night. I only made it until 11 pm before fatigue and creeping seasickness sent me down to the security of my bunk in the belly of the boat. The fresh morning air (and a seasickness pill) perked me up in the morning to begin today's shift. In the morning we crossed throught worst storm-affected areas of Sanibel Island and Fort Myers, where we saw a lot of debris floating in the water as well as the discoloration of the hurricane runoff, further stirred up by the night's big swells from the NW.

One encouraging sight, near shore off Naples, was that the buoy my lab group placed to mark out scuba research site is still there. It was tied around a natural bridge in the limestone seafloor. Impressive that it held up through the giant waves of the hurricane. Looking at the levels of murk in the water, and feeling the chilly 63 degree Fahrenheit breeze, is subtracting a bit from my enthusiasm about scuba diving tomorrow at our sites further off Naples. I know I'm with a good team of safe divers, though, so we should be able to get down there safely and get our area surveyed even if visibility is less than 1 meter.

Scuba Diving in Fort Pierce Inlet + LIONFISH!

"Ghost Fishing" is what they call it when lost or discarded fishing gear continues capturing and killing marine life. It's a big problem where I went to grad school on Chesapeake Bay, where thousands of stray crab traps litter the mud bottom.

Here in Fort Pierce, Florida, the local scuba shop organizes special dives where volunteers help clean up the derelict recreational fishing gear and other trash in Ft. Pierce inlet near the popular fishing jetty. They have to do the dives right at slack tide because the current honks through the inlet at high speed all other times. They also have to get city police to temporarily shut down fishing on the inlet side of the jetty, which is a major achievement, since there are usually dozens of lines in the water along the jetty at all hours of the day and night.

I have mixed feelings about recreational fishing. I like it because it gets people out from in front of their televisions and interacting with nature, which I reckon is a prerequisite for knowing and caring about nature. Fishing as a kid certainly played a big role in developing my interest in marine biology. But fishing also puts a strain on the environment by killing a lot of fish (even the ones that are released often die later), burning a lot of boat fuel, and introducing a lot of non-biodegradable plastic trash into the water, which can kill other animals.

Anyway, today my buddy Scott and I joined one of the clean-up dives. It was not a totally selfless act, because we really wanted to see what was down in the deep mysterious inlet where no one normally dives. What was down there was a shit-ton of fishing line and other trash. Way too much to even make a dent in with our pick-up. You would pull on one line, and realize it was connected to 100 others in a web of monofilament nastiness spreading across the seafloor. I filmed a little bit of the clean-up with my GoPro camera, but then I got tired of the awkward buoyancy of wearing a padded helmet underwater, and I figured the GoPro was fogged up anyway (it was), so I put it back on the boat.

Fort Pierce Inlet Scuba Cleanup from James Douglass on Vimeo.

Of course, as soon as I put the camera back, Scott led me on a cool underwater exploring trip to the deeper part of the inlet where a really cool rock ledge drops off to 40+ feet depth. The rock is totally covered with filter-feeding invertebrates like sponges, sea-squirts, feather-duster-worms, and Oculina corals. I think the strong tides and the plankton-rich lagoon water fuel the abundant growth of sessile invertebrates. There were also lots of big sheepshead fish, plus wrasses, blennies, spiny lobsters, and snook. We even saw (gasp) LIONFISH, the beautiful, deadly, non-native species that was recently introduced to the Atlantic from the Indo-Pacific and is now screwing up the Atlantic ecosystems by eating all the smaller fishes and being inedible to all the bigger fishes.

My friend Jean is an aspiring TV news reporter who put together this cool video on the lionfish invasion...

Lionfish Invasion from Jean Montgomery on Vimeo.

Craft's Creatures

My fellow marine biologist, Jonathan Craft, is an enthusiastic scuba diver and photographer. He has taken a lot of underwater pictures and video from dives we've done together near Fort Pierce. Here's a gallery of some of my favorites...

This "Flying Gurnard" was resting on the bottom near the beach. He has a surprise for you at the end of the video.


The nearshore reef here is not built of coral, but rather by the sand-encrusted tubes of a special kind of polychaete worm that lives in dense aggregations. This type of worm reef only forms where there is a lot of wave action and sediment moving around. The purple thing in the center is an urchin. Jonathan takes lots of pictures of urchins because he's studying their ability to eat algae that is poisonous to other organisms.

This is a closer-up picture of an urchin that shows the flexible tube-feet in between the hard spines.

Here's a different type of urchin.

This is a spiny lobster. It's a good thing these guys reproduce rapidly, because they are heavily harvested by divers. (We haven't taken any yet, but it's tempting.)

Some of the fish that hang around the worm reef are extremely well camoflaged. The next two pictures are poisonous stone fish. Can you see them?

Other fish are more obvious, like this cute green blenny (not it's scientific name).

Or these juvenile fish. (I like how the background looks on this one.)

This young Goliath Grouper is pretty big for a baby.

This is what a cowrie shell looks like when it's alive. The mantle (soft part of the animal) wraps all the way around from the aperture in the bottom of the shell to cover over the back. The head is on the right hand side of this picture. This individual was about six inches long! (Picture taken from an aquarium back at the lab.)

This is a polychaete worm tube, but of a different kind of worm than the one that builds the reef. This kind, a "Diapatra sp." lives alone.

Most places we've dived the visibility in the water has been pretty good, but sometimes we'll run into a phytoplankton bloom like the one obscuring me here.

Mixed in with the worm reef are a lot of neat algae and "sessile" (not able to move) organisms like this orange sponge...

...and this blue tunicate (colonial seasquirt).

Oh, I promised my buddy Scott I would put a cool picture of him in my blog since the last one I put in here was goofy and unflattering. So here's Scott as a super studly scuba diver. Fierce.

And here's Jonathan the photographer. Jon got a weird infection on his neck where his dive vest was rubbing him. The infection turned into a hideous, swollen abscess that had to be drained but he was a good sport about it. I won't show the picture of that.

More of Jonathan's pictures later, perhaps.

Cool Scuba and SUP Sessions

This weekend was cool because I got to do interesting water activities with my Florida friends.

Each morning started with scuba. On Saturday we had a great dive at Kimberly Bergalis Park, near my house. Here's my dive buddy Scott suiting up.

And here's my other dive buddy Jonathan cooling off in the water. Check out the total lack of wind and waves on the Atlantic. Jonathan took some underwater pictures and videos of our marine life encounters - hopefully he'll post them online so I can embed them in another post.

Saturday afternoon I taught some friends from out-of-town how to stand-up paddleboard on my Kona longboard. I think SUP is a good share-with-friends sport that isn't too hard the first time around. It might be a good back door into learning windsurfing for less gung-ho people, because it lets them figure out their board balance before adding the complication of sailing. Hmm...

The paddle I'm using for SUP is a cheapskate home-made affair. It's the head of a kayak paddle shimmed with duct tape, fitted into the aluminum rod from a pool skimming net, then duct taped some more around the outside of the joint. The handle knob (not pictured) is also duct tape. It's not pretty, but the price is right, and I was able to make two with one kayak paddle so Scott can go, too. If you're thinking about making your own SUP paddle, remember the length from the end of the blade to the top of the handle should be equal to your height plus about ten inches. Since I'm 5'10", my paddle is 6'8".

Red Green would be proud...



Later Saturday afternoon my jetski-owning neighbor Bill invited some people out for wakeboarding. Bill has never wakeboarded (he has a bad back) but he likes to tow people because he's a sadistic bastard... uh, I mean a generous gentleman. I found wakeboarding to be an intense mixture of scary, thrilling, exhausting, and painful. Kinda cool but not exactly my cup of tea. I'm more of the "ease into it at my own pace" kind of person than the "charge into it rough and tumble" kind of person.

The pinnacle of the weekend was finally getting enough wind for a planing windsurfing session on Saturday evening. A month ago I might not have hassled with rigging the 8.7 sail and the big yellow shortboard, but this time I was more than grateful for the opportunity. Awesome. :)

There wasn't any wind Sunday, but a dive session at Bathtub Beach in Stuart and another round of masochism behind Bill's jetski were enough to thoroughly satisfy my watersports quota.

Today I was responsible and worked until 6:30, but still got out for an amazing sunset SUP session at Fort Pierce inlet. I crossed the inlet to the North Jetty side, where the water was crystal clear and I could look down 15 feet to see snook, jacks, barracuda, and other big gamefish stalking around the rocks of the jetty. I even had a sweet, blue-planet style encounter with a giant manatee. He came RIGHT UP under the board and sniffed around it for about five minutes. I was crouching down on the deck, so we were like, face to face at water level. COOL! Actually, I think there were multiple manatees, because the close-encounter one had a series of prop scars on his back and the one I saw paddling back from the beach didn't. Next scuba dive will definitely have to be from the state park at North Jetty.

Wind Withdrawal; Dealing

Since I started windsurfing regularly in fall 2002, in Virginia, I've been seriously hooked. The first couple years in VA I took the winters off; no sessions between Thanksgiving and April Fool's day. As the addiction deepened, though, I started using more neoprene and doing it 12 months a year. I dealt with Virginia's lighter summer winds by using big sails, formula boards, and longboards, by taking trips to the Outer Banks, and by doing lessons and local races with the William and Mary and regional windsurfing clubs.

Here in East Central Florida, it's different. Ironically, while the weather is warm year round, Florida's "off season" for windsurfing is MORE pronounced than it is up north. From mid May until the end of summer there are no frontal systems of any significance, and no thermal winds besides a piddling, 5-10 mph seabreeze. Check the next week's iwindsurf forecast for my home spot... The horror, the HORROR!

In these winds, planing is not possible on typical windsurfing gear, which requires ~15 mph, and is rare even with formula gear, which requires ~10. My new kiteboard gear needs ~12, but with fickle wind changes, the constant threat of thunderstorms (think Benjamin Franklin), and no experienced kiters at the beach to help launch and land when the wind is that light, kiting really isn't a workable summer option. The majority vote in my "when will I get to use my Evo 83 waveboard" poll was "not until an August / September tropical storm system". I'm afraid that's about right, and it may be similarly long before I can do any kind of shortboard windsurfing or kiting. Sigh.

So, what am I going to do about it, besides whine and blog? Here's what I'm thinking:

1. Work. I'm busy with seagrass research in the Banana River Lagoon, and trying to publish various chapters of my grad school dissertation in science journals. I hate to admit it, but the lack of wind is helping.

2. Scuba dive. No wind means no waves, which means good visibility near shore in the Treasure Coast region. Last Sunday I dived off Pepper Park on North Hutchinson Island, and Tuesday I dived off Kimberly Bergalis Park on South Hutchinson. It was neat to see firsthand the submerged reef that waves break on in rougher weather. It's a mix of limestone ledges (fossil coral; the exposed foundation of Florida) and big boulders of living "worm reef". It rises from a sandy bottom about 13 feet deep to within 7 feet of the surface. Last time out we saw a big nurse shark, and a mix of tropical and warm-temperate fish species. Plus some whopper spiny lobster that might be fun to catch when the season opens.

3. Teach. Maybe if I can get some of my friends and colleagues comfortable windsurfing in this summer's 5-10 mph I'll have some partners in crime for fall's 10-20 mph. I also made a long paddle for SUP and I'm sharing that around, too.

4. Leave. When my seagrass experiment is done I'm going to take a trip to Washington State to visit my folks and windsurf the GORGE. That will be 8/18 - 8/27 if you're going to be there then and want to windsurf with a world-famous blogger. :P