During the first week of winter break, Teens4Oceans traveled to the Channel Islands, in The California Current Large Marine Ecosystem. The purpose of the trip was to survey a site for the installation of a self-cleaning underwater camera system, which was to be suspended from a custom-built buoy. Trevor Mendelow, the Executive Director of Teens4Oceans, along with his family and two teachers, drove a group of thirteen students to Santa Barbara in Southern California in a school bus, where they boarded an 80-foot dive boat for three days. From there the group traveled 24 miles across the channel to Santa Cruz and Anacapa, two of the eight Channel Islands.
Teens4Oceans’ students SCUBA dived, snorkeled, kayaked, and hiked, observing a wide variety of terrestrial and marine ecosystems. They discovered that the waters in and around the islands supports a variety of marine species, including grey whales, common dolphins, jellyfish, squid, seals, sea lions, many amazing invertebrates, and a spectacular variety of fish. On the first dive in Pelican Bay off Santa Cruz Island, the divers acquired basic knowledge of the underwater ecosystem, including temperature, depth, and visibility, and had to get used to the COLD water! The diving was a valuable opportunity to apply their knowledge of animal taxonomy and natural history. A breath-taking night dive provided the opportunity to observe the bioluminescence of marine life within the living kelp forests. Successive dives led them to conclude that the rich marine ecosystem of the Channel Islands would provide a perfect place to install an underwater camera system.
After meeting with members of the National Park Service, T4O made the decision that the installation of a large buoy within the National Park was going to be too challenging. Instead, T4O will look for another site for the marine buoy system that the organization is engineering, and will instead deploy an underwater camera system beneath a dock on Anacapa Island to perform a similar function. This is made possible by an existing high-speed wireless link that the NPS and the Ventura County of Education (VCOE) currently uses for their Channel Islands Live program. This partnership will be a superb opportunity to connect with school students in over twenty-two school districts in Southern California. The trip to the Channel Islands was a huge success; T4O hopes to return to the Channel Islands in the near future to complete the installation of the underwater camera. Once the camera is deployed, it will stream live footage of the amazing Kelp Forest Ecosystems and its surroundings to the Internet for public viewing.
