Our second maintenance trip is done!

The first week of May we did our second field trip to clean and extract the data from our smart mooring system located in Cahuita National Park, installed in July of 2022.

As always Cahuita welcomed us with amazing food and great people who’s always willing to help and support our project. In this case, Mirna Cortes, who works in the National Park, joined us on the boat and helped us with all the cleaning process. Mirna represents a part of the Cahuitan community that believes in this initiative and it’s been an important part of the process.

Our field trip began at 8:00 am, we sail from Cahuita to the National Park. First thing we did was to extract the memory card that is located at the top of the buoy in order to switch cards and put a new one. That way, we assure to have all data from the deployment till now up to date and safe.

Then, we headed to the bottom (around 8 meters depth) where we started cleaning and wiping all the algae away from the buoy, we cleaned both the surface and bottom temperature sensors and all the cables that goes from the bottom to the actual buoy at the surface.

We also brushed the buoy itself, and found a little guy, which house was actually our buoy, so we tried to not disturb him too much!

When we finished the maintenance work, we visited the coral nursery, led by our friends of Raising Coral Costa Rica, located about 10 meters away from the buoy to check and install a new coral tree with fragments collected in Kawe, a local reef located near the buoy.

One of our main goals with our project is to understand the ocean’s dynamics and conditions that can affect coral reefs and cause bleaching, so every time we go to the ocean, we take some time to check the coral’s health.

These maintenance trips are essential to preserve our buoy, that way, it can last and store data for a very long time, so don’t miss out our next fieldtrip!

Here we have some of the long-term data series that we’ve been working on up to date, soon we will be sharing some statistical analysis since we almost have a year of data, so stay tuned!

 

Figure 1. Top vs Bottom Temperature

 

Figure 2. Wind Speed vs Bottom Temperature

Pelagos Team!