Same Questions, New Ways

Until the anchors began sliding off the pallet, the crew could still have called the whole thing off. Months of preparation had led to this moment, followed by most of a day getting everything into position.

More than 700 metres of mooring line stretched ahead of the Hakai Institute’s new landing craft. At the far end floated Bute Inlet Ocean Observing Station (BIOOS), a large ocean-observing platform they had towed into Bute Inlet that morning. Beneath them was more than 600 metres of water.

If something didn’t look right, they could still reverse the operation. Haul the line back in. Reconnect the buoy to the Hakai Explorer. Tow it somewhere safe and try again another day.

“Once the anchor is sliding off the pallet into the sea,” says Chris MacKenzie, part of the Hakai team handling the deployment, “that’s it.”

The crew had deliberately carried the anchors past the point on the seafloor where they wanted them to land. A deep-water mooring does not simply fall straight down. As the anchors descend, the long line and the buoy at the surface pull against one another, swinging the system back through the water. Based on calculations and experience from earlier deployments, the crew had chosen a drop point roughly 200 metres beyond their target.

Now there was nothing left to do but let it fall.

Once the mooring had settled, the crew acoustically ranged on the releases. Those measurements were later used to calculate where the mooring had landed.

About 30 metres from the target.

“That’s really good,” Chris says.

The previous deployment of the same platform, using a chartered vessel, had landed about 350 metres from where the team intended. This time, the team deploying the equipment knew the boat, knew the mooring, and managed the deployment themselves from beginning to end.

Hakai has spent years building the capacity, equipment, and systems that made that possible.

BIOOS itself reflects the way Hakai used to approach this work.

The platform is old, large, and far heavier than the instruments it carries require. When the team recovered it from Bute for servicing, they discovered waterlogged foam and deteriorating fibreglass inside the float. They cut into it, removed the wet material, and rebuilt sections with new foam, glass, and epoxy.

They redesigned and replaced the bridle connecting the platform to its mooring. They designed and fabricated instrument mounts. They isolated parts of the tower to reduce the galvanic corrosion that can be particularly aggressive in coastal fjords. They also reworked the bottom of the mooring, replacing the heavy train wheels used as deadweight with lighter pyramid anchors and ground chain that gain some of their holding power from the seabed itself.

The work took about a month.

Then they had to get the thing back into Bute Inlet.

BIOOS is too large to fit aboard Hakai’s landing craft, so early on deployment morning it was put into the water at Heriot Bay on Quadra Island and attached to the Hakai Explorer, a converted water taxi.

They left at about 5:00 a.m. At about seven kilometres per hour, the tow took roughly eight hours.

Someone had to watch BIOOS the entire way. If the Explorer hit a patch of current at the wrong speed, the big platform could begin leaning alarmingly far over. The crew rotated through two-hour watches.

They also brought a barbecue.

“I made sausage and eggers,” Chris says.

By early afternoon, the Explorer had reached the deployment area in Bute Inlet. The landing craft came alongside, took over the mooring, and the crew began the deployment that would eventually put the anchors within 30 metres of where they wanted them.

For all its size and awkwardness, BIOOS works. It is providing the observations it was put there to collect.

But Chris sees the platform as a product of a particular stage in Hakai’s development.

“That’s with our old strategy,” he says. “Just take what you can get and then make it work.”

Then he describes what he thinks should replace that approach.

“Let’s get things that we can work with.”

He is talking about a buoy, but the distinction reaches much further.

For much of Hakai’s ocean-observing history, the Institute adapted equipment, vessels, and methods that already existed, some of them originally built for very different environments or scales of operation. The large buoy in Kwakshua Channel near Calvert Island is one example. It has produced an important long-term record, but servicing a system of that size requires a large vessel and all the logistics that come with one.

Wiley Evans, who leads Hakai’s oceanography team, began pushing toward systems better matched to those environments. Not smaller simply for the sake of being smaller, but fit for purpose.

The questions were not new: what is happening inside fjords and channels, how conditions change through the water column, and how those changes play out over days, seasons, and years. What was changing was the way Hakai could go about observing them.

“We’re always trying to figure out new ways of approaching that same problem,” says Eric Peterson, cofounder of the Hakai Institute.

A Boat That Keeps Changing

For years, the Hakai Explorer was one of the most useful boats in the Hakai fleet.

It was also, increasingly, the wrong tool.

When the team first began working with a Wirewalker, an ingenious autonomous profiling instrument made by Del Mar Oceanographic, the Explorer was still the boat they used to service it.

The boat had a small davit capable of lifting some lightweight equipment, but not always raising it high enough to clear the side. So they would use a portable winch above the cabin, which someone had to operate from the roof.

Eventually, after years of fatigue, the davit broke.

“It just wasn’t designed to do that,” Chris says.

The landing craft was built around the jobs Hakai was increasingly asking its boats to perform. It has a bow ramp, a large hydraulic crane, and a capstan for hauling heavy lines. Just as importantly, its deck was designed to be reconfigured.

Threaded attachment points spaced in a grid pattern on the deck allow equipment to be bolted down wherever the crew needs it. After they started using the boat, Jon Bergshoeff, Chris, and the rest of the team began adding their own pieces.

They fabricated stands that hold reels of mooring line, so hundreds of metres of rope can feed directly from interchangeable spools instead of being laid across the deck in figure-eights.

They made heavy removable cleats that can be positioned on the deck where a particular operation needs them.

They added a smooth pipe across the bow so the Wirewalker’s fragile inductive cable can enter and leave the water without bending too sharply.

The capstan, which seemed like a minor feature when the boat was being designed, has become central to how they work.

Each deployment changes the next one.

“You try once and you find out what you did wrong and try again,” says Wayne Jacob, who helped develop the vessel.

The boat that arrived from the builder was only the starting point.

Catching a Wirewalker

The instrument spends its life travelling up and down a 250-metre section of cable beneath a surface float.

That motion is not powered internally.

Instead, it is powered by the motion of the waves.

As the surface float moves, a mechanism ratchets the instrument downward along the line. When it reaches the bottom of its travel, the mechanism disengages and the buoyant instrument rises back toward the surface before beginning again.

In favourable conditions, it can complete a profile through the water roughly every half hour.

Since February, the Bute Wirewalker has completed thousands of those profiles, travelling hundreds of vertical kilometres and generating tens of millions of rows of observations.

The sensors still rely on batteries, and every several weeks those batteries need changing. One way to service the instrument would be to trigger the acoustic releases on the seabed and recover the entire mooring: hundreds of metres of line, heavy downweights, and all the hardware connecting it to the bottom.

Jon wondered whether they could leave all of that where it was and simply catch the Wirewalker.

There was a problem.

The instrument does not normally stay at the surface. When it reaches the top of its cycle, a mechanical trigger sends it downward again. A crew arriving by boat would somehow have to intercept it during the brief period when it was floating.

Jon’s solution is elegantly simple.

He took a shrimp float, cut it in half lengthwise, and made it so it could clip around the Wirewalker’s line. He calls it the “Bumper Guard.”

The crew approaches the Wirewalker’s surface float, lifts it with the crane, and clips the Bumper Guard around the line.

When the instrument next rises, the float physically prevents the trigger from being depressed.

The Wirewalker reaches the surface and stops.

The crew can then secure the Wirewalker to the underside of the float with a short length of rope and lift both onto the deck as one package. They swap the deployed Wirewalker for the second instrument, put everything back into the water, and remove the Bumper Guard.

The mooring never has to leave the seabed.

Even that process has evolved.

The irony of servicing a wave-powered instrument is that crane work on the landing craft requires calm water. Sometimes the conditions are perfect for the boat and terrible for the Wirewalker: without waves, it does not move enough to complete its cycle and return to the surface.

At first, the crew drove the boat around to make wake.

More recently, they have used the crane to raise and lower the float, simulating the wave action that drives the instrument down the wire.

On a good day, the entire swap takes about an hour, and the mooring keeps producing an almost continuous record.

Nobody designed the boat, the Wirewalker, or the mooring with that exact procedure in mind. The crew figured it out by working with all three.

Before the Boat Leaves

The flexibility on the water depends on a lot of preparation beforehand.

Before a deployment, the crew may spend days or weeks in the shop preparing. Sensors are checked. Batteries changed. Hardware assembled. Voltages recorded. Equipment lists run down to individual shackles. The operation is talked through before anyone leaves the dock.

“We can sort of visualize the problem and discuss it,” Chris says, “before we’re even out in the field.”

On the landing craft, roles are broad enough to overlap. A three-person crew typically includes a captain, crane operator, and deck lead, but people rotate through those jobs. Beforehand, the same people may have been working together on the instruments in the shop.

Sam Albers, who works on the software side of Hakai’s ocean-observing program, describes the Institute as having “a bunch of curious people” who do not simply stay in their lanes.

Eric sees the same quality across Hakai. The people doing this work, he says, “embrace change, they embrace new ways of doing things, and really look for innovative ways of doing things.”

Chris adds an important qualification.

“I always say you have to work to your strengths.”

The value is not that everyone can do everything.

It is that enough knowledge overlaps for a small group to understand the whole operation, while still knowing who should be doing what when something matters.

Much of what makes the crew efficient in the field happens long before the boat leaves. By the time they get there, many of the decisions have already been thought through.

Following the Observations Home

The same principle continues after the instrument comes out of the water.

A Wirewalker can generate vastly more observations than a conventional profiling instrument lowered repeatedly over the side of a boat. Then all of that data has to go somewhere.

Sam works on the systems that turn those observations into usable data.

While the Wirewalker is deployed, a smaller stream of information travels by satellite, telling the team whether the instrument is operating normally and whether the batteries are healthy.

The full-resolution record stays aboard until the instrument is serviced. Once recovered, the data enters a processing system Hakai had already built for oceanographic profiles.

The Wirewalker is a very different machine from a conventional instrument lowered from a boat. But both produce the same fundamental thing: a vertical profile through the water.

Hakai’s digital infrastructure was already built to process and store water-column profile data, regardless of which instrument collected it.

There is a similar flexibility on the landing craft. Its deck allows equipment to be added or rearranged without rebuilding the boat around each instrument.

And both still depend on people.

Before the data is considered ready for analysis, it still goes through human quality control. Automated checks can flag unusual values, but someone has to decide whether they reflect a sensor problem or a real change in ocean conditions.

The machines make it possible to observe more.

They do not remove the need to understand what has been observed.

Fit for Purpose

None of this makes large vessels obsolete.

The landing craft has some limitations. Crane work can quickly become unstable as waves build, and some equipment is simply too heavy. Hakai still relies on larger vessels for jobs that require that capacity.

The crew is also quick to point out how young the capability still is. They have been operating the landing craft this way for about a year and a half, largely in sheltered conditions.

“It’s all trade-offs,” Chris says.

BIOOS makes that transition particularly visible.

The platform now floating in Bute Inlet works because a crew spent a month rebuilding it, then spent eight hours towing it into the inlet, then used a new boat and a growing base of experience to put its anchors within about 30 metres of where they wanted them.

The next version of this system does not have to look like BIOOS or be deployed the same way.

Ask Wiley Evans whether all these new tools have fundamentally changed the questions Hakai is asking of the coastal ocean, and his answer is more nuanced.

“The base-level questions haven’t changed much,” he says. “Is the ocean changing? Why, how much, and where are the signals largest or smallest?”

What has changed is the scale at which those questions can be asked. Platforms such as the Wirewalker and ocean gliders can reveal changes over shorter periods and smaller areas than less frequent conventional sampling could resolve.

Wiley calls this “ocean weather”: the conditions marine life experiences over short periods, which can help set the stage for what happens over the coming months. Some of those signals were once too poorly resolved to distinguish from noise. Now they can be observed and their effects investigated.

The ocean still has to be observed over years. Temperature, oxygen, carbon, fresh water, and circulation do not become easier to understand because the instruments become smaller.

What has changed is Hakai’s ability to decide how to observe.

A boat can be modified. A servicing method can be invented. A mooring can be redesigned. A new instrument can be folded into an existing data system.

The questions may be much the same. The ways Hakai can approach them keep evolving.