We tracked the lone whale mentioned in yesterday’s log through a couple of dive cycles to give us all a chance to get used to photographing, collecting data and tracking animals again and to make sure we had all the information on the whale that we needed. This was also our first chance to use some new data collection routines.

Over the last year Douglas Gillespie, who wrote the Logger program that we use to collect data, has introduced some significant enhancements: allowing forms to be opened by remote buttons and for many instances of a form to open as tabs on a single page. Ricardo, one of our more technical team members, has coupled this to a set of wireless remote switches allowing us to open forms, and initiate activities such as making recordings, from on deck or anywhere on the boat. We believe that these two innovations will allow us to collect a better more integrated dataset, but as with any new system, initial trials will probably suggest some tweaking and fine tuning.

As we left the whale, under sail, to resume our monitoring survey we were able to make an extended recording of the animal at steadily increasing ranges. This is for a team at Herriot Watt University in Edinburgh who are developing an open source software package, PAMGUARD, to facilitate the detection and tracking of cetaceans for mitigation during seismic surveys with funding from the IRFC. Sperm whales are one of their priority species and we will be making recordings for them like this whenever we are moving away from whales after tracking to resume monitoring.

Unfortunately, for the rest of the day we suffered the now familiar frustration of excellent weather but no whales. As we move west in the Northern Gulf, however, we expect to come into areas of higher abundance and larger groups.