One of the challenges that I have faced teaching my Ocean 101 class has been to bring Oceanography alive. I find Oceanography alive and exciting by definition, but graphs, maps, plots and figures can sometimes be too abstract for students. This field trip was an attempt to bring Oceanographic principles alive on Puget Sound, and to get some students to appreciate natural processes a little more. This trip was made possible by the tireless organizational efforts of Brad Sousa and Fritz Stahr, and the use of Ed's Girl, graciously provided by Paul Stanfill. Most of the teaching was facilitated by Katie Greene, Erika McPhee, Keelan McPhee, and Gabe Vecchi, who were graduate student volunteers from the University of Washington School of Oceanography.
The basic plan of this expedition was to familiarize the students with the instruments and practices of research at sea. It is relatively easy to observe laboratory demonstrations and deal with cleaned and parsed data, but considerably more challenging to actually collect data and make sense of it. The day was split into 4 main categories: (1) observing the river plume exiting the Puyallup River using CTD measurements, (2) collecting plankton using simple plankton net tows for viewing under the microscope, (3) measuring currents off of Pt. Defiance, and (4) performing a dredge to look at bottom dwelling organisms. Below are links to the worksheets and itineraries that the students took on board Ed's Girl.