It’s been a rough few days on the sea off southern California for the SOCAL-BRS effort. We need relatively calm seas (e.g, <10-15 kt winds and <3-4 ft seas) and if you check out the offshore actual weather and forecasts for the outer waters where we hope to work with beaked whales and other pelagic (open water) species more commonly occur you will see a lot of numbers higher than that. Most of the seas, especially in the afternoons, are looking more like the picture above snapped from the R/V Truth. But we did hear some beaked whales on our acoustic listening array today which was promising. We have another four days in the field and, while the forecast is largely the same this week, we will keep with it and hope to get tags deployed.
