Ocean Sentry
(From sfgate.com) San Francisco Bay – Around 8 a.m. Saturday, 51 people, five California sea lion yearlings and a pug named Capt. Meatball headed out for the Farallon Islands. The trip, dubbed the Vessel Watch Project, was organized by San Francisco Bay Whale Watching and Seaflow, a nonprofit group that fights noise pollution in the ocean.
“Oceanic noise pollution is an emerging issue,” said Seaflow Executive Director Robert Overtz, whose group has identified commercial sea vessels as the primary noisemakers. “These ships emit sound on the same frequency as marine mammals such as whales, dolphins, sea lions, etc. The number of cargo ships has been doubling every 10 years, and we believe that it”s changing these animals” ability to hear.”
He said their whole world is about sound – that’s how they find food, mate, locate prey and predators.
“It would be like living in an airport,” Overtz said.
The first clue the group got that this trip would be a different kind of whale-watching expedition was a visit from state Assemblyman Jared Huffman, D-Sonoma, before they left shore.
“I’ve been trying to think of something I could compare the current boom in shipping to,” he said, “I came up with the Gold Rush.”
He spoke briefly on the need to get a handle on the environmental repercussions of commercial shipping before it became “a lethal situation.”
When Seaflow was founded in 1999, the main goal was to raise awareness about the disruptive nature of Navy sonar surveys, which were found to be responsible for mass strandings of whales and dolphins in the late ’90s. However, under Overtz’s command, Seaflow has become more active in identifying commercial shipping as a threat.
In particular, Seaflow is trying to compel large shipping boats to reduce their speed to 10 knots per hour along the three contiguous sanctuaries that line the mouth of the Golden Gate. They also aim to create a database of oil tankers and cargo ships that violate sanctuary rules and to make recordings of the underwater sound pollution.
The day was dotted with frequent stops so that the group could listen to three hydrophones, underwater microphones, dropped from different parts of the boat.
“The goal is to create a physical connection to the ocean,” Overtz said. “It’s difficult for people to connect with the ocean, it’s so large and scary for some. Here, we let people listen to what it sounds like.”
