This week I changed sites from Cape Perpetua to the future marine reserve location at Cascade Head. On Tuesday, Melissa and I drove around area to scout out the best locations to do pressure counts. We figured out that the reserve basically spans the entirety of Lincoln City and around the Salmon River and Cascade Head. This site  isso different from Cape Perpetua, because it is located in one of the most urban areas on the coast rather than in the middle of a forest.

I quickly noticed that giving surveys in this area was much different than Cape Perpetua as well. I started giving surveys in the parking lot of a huge beach in the heart of Lincoln City called “DRiver” and I was disappointed to find that more people refused to take the survey that day than perhaps the entirety of people I asked at Cape Perpetua. I think this crowd was headed straight to the beach and not interested in hanging out in the parking lot. On the bright side, hundreds of people pass through that area in an hour, so I still had no problem finding people to interview. The surveys showed that visitors to Lincoln City tended to include more families, locals, and day-travelers than Cape Perpetua. When I explained this to Melissa, she recognized that there might be some bias in our survey in this area due to the fact that I was only interviewing people coming from a parking lot and would therefore never sample people who had simply walked out to the beach from their rental houses/hotels. This would make the survey more biased towards locals and people on day-trips rather than multi-day visitors. To fix this bias, I started interviewing people on the beach, which actually turned out to be very efficient, because people were stationary, relaxed, and much more willing to take the survey so I could just jump from group to group.

The part of the Cascade Head reserve that is the most contentious is the area of the ocean directly beyond the Salmon River Estuary. Fishermen claim that they travel out beyond the large sandbar that marks the boundary between the estuary and ocean, so therefore a marine reserve in this area would affect them greatly. People at the ODFW are skeptical that they travel to this area often, because the bar is very difficult to navigate. I am helping to answer this question by observing whether or not there are boats beyond the bar at the mouth of the estuary. Also, I ask all fishermen that I at Knight Park (the boat launch area for the estuary) whether they fished in the ocean or stayed in the estuary. I can see that questioning these fishermen has the possibility of being a little tricky, but so far it has gone well!