27 Aug - Columbia River Estuary North Channel

There were concerns about traveling to the North Channel - rumor had it that the sand flats had shifted, making the channel inaccessible. Thankfully, these rumors were false. We sampled water six times during the day - three at ebb slack in the morning, and three at flood slack in the evening. We did not get freshwater samples, but surface salinity was 4.1 at the end of the ebb in the morning. Bottom salinities were high. I made a mistake in site selection - the middle of the three stations was located close to the up-estuary station near the bridge rather than being equidistant between the up-estuary and down-estuary sites. Bottom salinity ranged from 10 to 32, and surface salinity ranged from 4.1 to 30.5. During the day the R/V Forerunner pulled alongside and we conducted simultaneous CTD casts to cross-calibrate our instruments. After collecting our final water sample we anchored for the night.[img_assist|nid=768|title=R/V Forerunner|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=200|height=150]