Taking Advantage of the Current
Finally we made it to the beautiful Canal Copihue. The currents this time around felt less severe, probably because we didn’t have to use the pneumatic drill. We were able to time our dives with the current and take advantage of the currents in order to carry us from one dive site to the other all while at 20m.
Beautiful Debrief
After swapping out the two current meters in two different sites we began the process of photographing the long term monitoring experiments. To our surprise some of the recruitment plates we put out in March 2016 already had some life on them! Some anemones (closed up in this picture) are happy to colonize the free space.
In a Timely Manner
We establish three sites in the canal and work feverishly to drill enough holes to install our equipment with the limited number of days we have left. The time it takes to drill is the bottleneck of the operation. With the force one must exert to operate the drill and remain in place against the current we are consuming air much more rapidly than normal. We install two current meters (seen in above photo). This device measures the speed and direction of the current in the canal, which seems to be wind driven by the neighboring larger bodies of water at either end of the canal. We assume that the current is wind driven because within a one hour period it can easily change directions entirely up to three times.
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