13 June 2013 Fish Pots, Fish Spy, and Irresistible Oranges...

Yesterday and today were busy. My shift began with preparing and deploying the fish pots. These are large wire baskets with a bait bag attached. You saw us cutting up bait the other day. There are two net tunnels the fish can enter to get to the bait. The crazy thing is that the fish can’t figure out how to get out. I suppose some may, but pretty much once they are in, they stay in. The pots are thrown over and marked by a big red buoy and flashing light on the surface. They will stay for about 24 hours and we will pick them up Thursday.

As you can see from the pictures, it was a blustery, snowy winter day. You might think we are freezing but as the old saying goes, there is no bad weather, only bad clothing. Between my layers and float coat I was nice and toasty. Any guesses why they call those bright orange coats we are wearing float coats? Yep, they have a sort of built in life jacket in them and a beaver tail, which is a flap that comes around from behind and fastens in the front so you coat won’t slip off if you fall in. I have some more video to upload when I get back to station. If anyone has requests of video they'd like to see - bring it.

The most exciting part of the day was launching the fish spy. This has truly been a team effort to get her out into the sea. I’m sure you are all waiting with baited breath how she fared. The results? Mixed. The great thing was that the technology worked. The camera sent back a steady stream of video. Although very tricky, we managed to let out the camera cable and the tether rope together. The not so great thing is that we weren’t able to make it to the bottom. We saw a steady stream of plankton zooming past the camera as we went down. We also concluded that our little Fish Spy needs a back fin to help stabilize her. So like so many scientific ventures, we have to go back to the shop and add a fin. Tomorrow we will head out to shallower waters so that we can zero in on some benthic organisms (remember that word?) So the system works, the structure needs a little more work, and our mission is still on! Tomorrow I will show you the modifications we made on the ship...Very ingenious.

So here’s your challenge. One of the Mates, Greg, said when he used fish pots in Alaska they ran out of bait one time but had a bunch of old fruit and threw it in the bait bag. That bag drew more fish than before. They began using oranges with great results. We tried it and sure enough of the 16 fish pots, the one with the orange in the bait bag had the most fish by far in it. Okay, so this isn’t a great sample size but any guesses how you might account for this seemingly irresistible lure? I’m all ears waiting for your thoughts…