Realizing a dream

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TSandM

Missed and loved by many.
Rest in Peace
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Today, I got to be part of something that realized a dream I've had for over a year.

The year I started diving, there were no black rockfish to be seen in any of our dive sites. I learned about them, but I never saw any. Over the past few years, they've become more and more common, and we see them in numbers and many places. At the same time, I've become convinced that I'm seeing fewer and fewer reef fish on the reefs of Maui. My husband shares my perception, and there are a couple of studies that seem to bear it out.

What those two examples illustrate is that dive sites change with time, or may change with time . . . since the average lifespan of a diver in the sport is fairly short (some studies say less than five years) there is little institutional memory. Each new diver goes underwater with a sense of wonder of what he sees . . . but the old-timers say, "It was better when," and nobody really knows.

Global Underwater Explorers, an agency through which I have had some training, but which is also an agency with a heavy bent toward conservation, has begun an ambitious project. It's called Project Baseline, and the concept is to begin to create an archive of documentation of dive sites, whether they are reefs, wrecks, lakes, rivers, or anyplace else that divers go. Documentation can be photographic, narrative, or numeric, and it's keyed to Google Earth, so that repeated measurements, evaluations or photographs can be uploaded and indexed to the same site. The intent is to record the changes, positive or negative, in the places we visit.

Ever since I read about this idea, I've wanted to be involved with it. I've seen changes, and I know that the people who set rules and policies are rarely people who get to see the places I go. But it takes a critical mass of people to do good documentation, and for this project, it takes some folks who are more computer-savvy than I am, to help get the data archived properly.

Today, our Seattle group did our first Project Baseline dive. We picked a simple site, a common shore diving location that was easy to access and not too challenging in conditions. Because of the variety of kinds of sites that people can choose to document, the project guidelines require the local efforts to design and implement their own procedures, and this was our "proof of concept" dive . . . and it was my baby.

Some things worked and others didn't. We learned a lot about the site and about how to run this kind of group activity. And we had fun, and brought people together for a common purpose. It was not a polished thing, like the beautiful bathymetric survey of Whaler's Cove that the Monterey GUE folks did a while back, but it was our first outing. And it was a big step toward accomplishing something I've wanted to do for some time.

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Congratulations on getting your local Project Baseline group up and running!

Here's the website for Project Baseline. The whole thing is relatively new (even though some components of it have been in the works for years), and I just got an email from Dr. Todd Kincaid that outlines GUE's plans to take Project Baseline and expand it.

Dedicated volunteers like Lynne are what make all this stuff possible, and their energy is what keeps it going. I hope more people get involved with conservation initiatives like this! We need all the help we can get.
 
Congratulations to you and your team! Thanks for posting this Lynn. Project Baseline is a really worthwhile activity.

I got the same email refered to above from Dr Kincaid, and have been trying to figure out how to get something going in the dive sites I frequent.

I think that its worth pointing out that even though Project Baseline is a GUE intitiative, they are very clear that a team does not need to be all GUE, or even all divers. This might be a good opportunity to show that GUE is not as isolationist as some people think!
 
Congrats TSandM, projects like these are essential to ensure that we know what is really happening in various underwater environments.

Personally I have witnessed major changes in some areas around Jeddah in Saudi Arabia where I lived and dived for 11 years, unfortunately "progress" comes before environment especially in third world countries.
 
Some things worked and others didn't. We learned a lot about the site and about how to run this kind of group activity. And we had fun, and brought people together for a common purpose. It was not a polished thing, like the beautiful bathymetric survey of Whaler's Cove that the Monterey GUE folks did a while back, but it was our first outing. And it was a big step toward accomplishing something I've wanted to do for some time.
Care to share what you felt worked and what didn't, specifically? This sounds like a great idea to me and I'd really like to get involved somehow, if I ever get more time to dive.
 
I'm also interested in lessons learned since NEUE is working one up for this summer and we've started a bit of planning.

Also excited to see how Project Baseline develops. GUE just hired a coordinator to facilitate local efforts around PB, so hopefully this will get some traction, particularly among non-GUE teams.
 
My only concern is this gives fisherman and spearo's the location of where the fish are at. Fisherman frequent dive forums, although in puget sound no rockfish can be obtained, so I post them most of all.

The wdfw fisheries have dive teams and put reefs out long ago and do there studies on them which I guess you can find recent info if there there.

Now as far as a changing dive site, here on our Island we have a marina that has a tire reef and for a tire reef this thing is glowing with life. A ohio university came to dive and study this for years, still some tags left. they would be astounded now.
Actually it is good and bad, for the expansion they want to remove the reef, now to place not far away a new reef structure needs to be placed for the critters to move to. Now before the port took it over, for some reason the asians would take all fish I watch them empty the rockfish population for years. Now with harbor master that is no longer.

Good and Bad the floating dock the city purchased years ago has mussels on it they drop and all crabs eat and the sea stars are covered every where, Now my friend told me that the reason we do not see ling, greenling, and any fish that lays eggs is cause the sea stars gobble them down and males cant keep up. the good they moved on(or died off) the bad, this was a striving breeding ground for lings and greenling.

So hope you project works for what you want, but does not matter what diver does or say's or shows it will not change anything humane destroys here in our waters.

I can say there is a lot of sea life everywhere, divers just don't get in a boat and dive everywhere.
 
Well, we were diving a site that's a fairly steady slope down to 100 feet. We dove as teams of three, with one person tasked with keeping track of the depth contour the team was swimming, and the elapsed time from one piece of structure to another. A second team member was recording on wetnotes, and a third had a camera, to try and get photo documentation of structure and inhabitants. The team structure worked well. The "elapsed time" as a proxy for distance didn't, as we had current at the beginning of the dive that died about halfway through. To do a better job, we have to have a real method of measuring distances (eg. line).

The final thing that didn't work was swimming depth contours. My familiarity with the site was for depths down to about 95 feet, and down to there, the site is a fairly steady, flat slope, so swimming a depth contour also means swimming a heading. Apparently, at about 100 feet, things change, and there's kind of a hill or mound, so the 100 foot depth contour curves around almost on itself, and 120 also meanders. We would have been better off saying, "Start at 100 feet on this line, and go straight north." But the line doesn't go to 100 or 120, so we probably would have had to run some . . . anyway, we need some better planning for precise measurement.

It was fun. Now we have to figure out how to get the data together and up on the PB site.
 
Interesting and congratz. I think I'm going to pass this onto the univeristy scuba club I'm part of and see what they thing about adding this to our list of dives to do.
 
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