I don’t know what the conditions are going to be like in Cook Inlet, but I can’t imagine they’re going to be like what we had the past three days. Blue skies, favorable winds, easy miles and no worries. It was a good group and I enjoyed our time together… now I’m counting down the hours.

We hope you’ll be able to come out to say goodbye on June 20^th at the Parkway Tavern in Tacoma. That’s one week from today… we’ll be having a Bon Voyage Party and we’d love to see you before we go. We can tip back a beer together, tell stories and look through photos and charts of where we’ll be going. Please save the date and come out to send us on our way!

When: June 20, 2013 – 6:30-9:30pm

Where: Parkway Tavern  313 North “I” Street, Tacoma

With any new boat, there’s a period of adjustment involved. It takes time to figure out the capabilities of a kayak, how it handles in different situations, how it feels empty and loaded, the balance between speed and maneuverability. Most of the time, it’s not about the boat as much as it is about the paddler and the way that the boat and the operator work together. Paddling a kayak is not like the experience you might get in a rowboat or a sailboat, after all. A kayak is worn, like a piece of clothing almost, and it’s important to get the fit just right. The only way to get a handle on the situation is to spend time in the kayak, put the miles under the hull.

I took out the Seaward Quest x3 the other day for a few hours. (It’s ironic, but with all the expedition prep that’s going on lately, paddling is the one thing there never seems to be enough time for.) Conditions were good, flat water with strong current in the Tacoma Narrows and over to Vashon Island. I spent some time in the rip of of Point Defiance, first letting the converging currents buffet the boat and push me in different directions, then paddling across the eddy lines, getting a feel for the way the keel cut through the water. The rest of the time was spent in metronomic pace, getting used to the speed of the craft and the ease of travel.

It’s a fast boat. It doesn’t take long to figure that out. Even so, at 19 feet long, it’s surprisingly responsive and carves a turn easily. In terms of what it can carry, well, it can hold a lot of gear. I’ll be teaching a 3-day class next week before we head north, putting it through a more realistic test of what it’s going to see in Alaska but I have no doubt that it will perform splendidly. I am looking forward to every stroke.

Incredibly small but just as deadly as it’s larger cousins. Photo courtesy of Marine Environmental Research Institute

Water Sampling

I had advised Gregg of our upcoming trip to Alaska this summer and he found another science project that he thought would be a good fit for us. Using the magic of webcams and Skype, he introduced me to Abby Barrow of the Marine Environmental Research Institute. Abby fills the role of Coastal Monitoring and Outreach Coordinator and is in charge of the microplastic water sampling program.

Although the science is rather complicated – I’ll save that for another time after I’ve had a chance to read all the information she’s sent – our role for collecting the water samples from around Augustine Island is straight forward:

Take a 1 liter bottle with the cap lined in aluminum foil (to prevent contamination of the sample) and rinse 3 times in water from collection area. Fill and cap bottle. Record time, GPS coordinates, water temperature, wind speed (using the Beaufort scale), and wind direction.

At the end of our trip we’ll mail all the samples back (we are planning on taking 15 at Augustine Island, and 15 more at Chisik Island) along with our data. Once Abby receives them she’ll run them through a medical filter system looking for micro-plastics less than 5 microns in diameter.

Not overly difficult, but nonetheless we’re very excited to be part of this program. If time permits – we are leaving in 12 days after all – I’ll try to publish more of the science. If not, you’ll certainly hear more when we return in late July.

But there is another layer to this idea of support and it doesn’t get nearly enough attention. To all the individuals and families who have given generously to this project over the past year, we would like to offer our heartfelt thanks. To those who wrote checks, who put their own hard-fought cash into the mix to help us get to the point that we are able to get on the ferry in a couple weeks, we are immensely grateful. The folks who contributed to our fund-raising campaign, who bought raffle tickets, who came out to see the Roadless Coast film in theaters and classrooms from Arcata to Forks, we seriously could not begin to do what we’re doing without you.

(For those of you who are going to be in the Tacoma are on June 20th, we’d love to see you at the Bon Voyage party at the Parkway and get the chance to say thanks in person. Give a call if you’d like more info 253.691.7941)

It’s hard to know exactly what we’ll find on this year’s expedition. That story has not yet been written but I believe it will be an interesting and valuable one when it finally does get told. Thanks to all of you for making it happen… we appreciate every one of you and no matter how often we think it, we can’t say it enough.

(And don’t tell me that they are recyclable. Less than 5% of grocery bags nationwide are actually recycled, and even then, they are turned into something else, some other plastic item, that cannot be recycled, that will end up in a landfill. If we’re lucky. Just as likely that the bags will be flushed out to sea, where the impact on marine life is considerable. Likewise, the stories of how so many of these bags are actually reused, as laundry bags or even perchance making another trip to the grocery store, are missing the point. Certainly, the argument that these bags are needed to pick up after our dogs is an especially telling point of view. If it’s really true that we feel the need to enshrine our pet’s excrement in an impervious layer of polymer in order to live a full and comfortable life then we, as a society, may need to do some serious self-examination.)

That there are legitimate uses for plastic is not in doubt. Parts for artificial hearts, dialysis machine components, but… We leave in two weeks and I know that, when we get to where we’re going, we’ll find plastic. I don’t know how much and I don’t know what kind, but just knowing that this is the case makes the questions bubble up in my mind.

According to some stories I’ve been seeing in the media lately, we’re living in the time of citizen scientists. It’s a return to a way of intelligence-gathering and analysis that used to be the norm, but that fell out of fashion sometime in the last century as science became the realm of professionally trained academics. With the advent of portable and widely-available technology (smart phones, laptops, etc.), the methodology and the tools are present now for a wider segment of society to be involved in the data collection and observations upon which science depends.

It’s not so much that scientists are being evicted from their ivory towers. We need professionally trained minds to help develop the future, to use current information to predict what will come next and to give us ideas of how we should interact with our world. But the role of the citizen scientist, the data gatherer and advance trend-spotter on the ground has never been more important. Just as data without analysis is meaningless, decisions cannot be made without information. If science is to progress, it will be a team effort.

The Ikkatsu Project is citizen science. We go to places that are not frequently visited and we study them in ways that they have not been studied before. We collect specific information and bring it back to be included in the general set of data, where it can be used to inform future activities like prioritization of beach cleanup, sea bird studies and other survey activities. At the same time, by filming the process and by developing educational programs, we are trying to bring the operation to as many people as possible, to show other citizens the nature and the scope of the issues facing our oceans, and provide them with ideas about how they can get involved in the process.

That’s citizen science. Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin would have seen that right away. Given the chance, Ben Franklin and Rene Descartes would have loved to kayak remote Alaskan shorelines, conducting surveys of marine debris. Pretty sure.

Steve and I will be having a meeting today, one of many that will be happening as D-day approaches. There are still a few supplies to be purchased, though not many, and there’s the filming aspects to go over. The survey gear is taken care of and there are just a few items left to get for the bird studies… it is all coming together, and fairly quickly.

There is a sense, way back in the planning stages of any big trip, that the actual journey itself will never happen. It’s so far away, there is so much to be done to get it all together, it hardly seems possible that it can ever really take place. I’ve had that feeling before, on other projects, and I certainly have felt that way at times over the past eight months or so. The thing is that by the time the departure date arrives, I always end up realizing that the trip really began months before, that my mind starts its wandering before my feet ever begin to move.

I used to live in Ketchikan. It was the mid 1980′s, I was young then, and didn’t know very much. About much. But I loved K-Kan. That 11 months was about the best 5 years of my life. Working odd jobs, from the slime line at the cannery to playing guitar in O’Dowd’s Pub, and just about everything in between.

Ketchikan is the first Alaskan town we’ll come to on our way up the inside passage and I’m sure it’s changed a lot since the last time I was there. Our ferry will be stopping there for a few hours and I am hoping we’ll get the chance to walk around, to see what memories come back.

We had our first test packing this past week, our first attempt to pack the kayaks with the exact gear we expect to be taking as we paddle the Alaska Peninsula portion of this summer’s expedition. (For the Augustine Island portion of the trip, we’ll be boated in and working mostly from a base camp – although we are planning one short 3-day excursion – so we don’t have the same space issues we’ll have once we make the crossing to the peninsula.)

On the whole, we were both very pleased with the way the gear fit into the hatches. The filming equipment is the wild card; it takes up a significant chunk of both of the kayaks and making sure that all fit well was a priority. We do have back deck bags in case we need more room than we have, but I’m hopeful that we won’t need them. If I do use mine, it will probably be for the copter – just to avoid any stress that it might have being crammed into the back hatch.

There will be another packing session, maybe more than one, before we actually get going. Initial results are good, however, which is one less thing to worry about with three weeks to go.