Fjord day

Fog over the cormorants. Photo by Marta Faulkner.

Fog hung over the fjord as we pulled away from the dock in the early morning. It wasn't thick or soupy like fog sometimes is. Rather, the moisture clung together in ribbons that weaved around the rocky hills. The fog had its own agenda, knew its own limits. It did not feel the need to blanket us but rather traversed its own path between the peaks. The fog let us be. 

After leaving the dock, our first stop was at a cormorant colony. I felt the boat's engines shift gear and calm their mechanical whir. After years of working at sea, the drop of an engine to me means one thing and one thing only: we have arrived at a sampling station. 

I didn't care about the cormorant colony. Or the seals that lounged on rocks at the next stop. Or the waterfall cascading into the sea. Each of those marvelous sights drew the 100-some passengers on our boat out of doors, cameras in hand. They slid past one another in the narrow passages and elbowed one another for position on the bow. I wanted none of it. I was fully occupied already. 

Collecting water in the fjord. Photo by Marta Faulkner.

Every time our boat stopped, I collected water samples to filter for eDNA. The 5 minutes allotted by our captain for photography were just enough to lower and raise my bucket over the side and collect triplicate samples of 4 L each. The intent may have been for tourists to see wildlife, but with the captain's permission, I turned each stop into a sampling station. By the end of the day, I had sampled at 7 stations, all laid out in a beautiful transect through the fjord. 

At the head of the fjord, we even approached two glaciers: Balmaceda and Serrano Glaciers. Balmaceda feeds directly into the fjord, but Serrano feeds into a lake that is connected to the fjord by a small river. As I filtered the fjord water, a sei whale surfaced nearby - there will be probably be sei whale DNA in those samples! I am incredibly excited to see how biodiversity changes from the head of the fjord near the glaciers to open water near town. Successful sampling means it was a great day out in the fjord.