This week I continued to do pressure counts and surveys at Cascade Head. This week I found the surveys to be challenging not because people weren’t willing to participate, but rather because they were very cautious about their answers. As I described earlier, I am finding that I survey a lot more local people in the Cascade Head area and naturally they seem to be more concerned about the Marine Reserve. People are asking me more and more questions before they give me their answers, which can be difficult because I don’t want to give away information that might influence their answers but at the same time I still want them to make a well-informed decision. The most common questions I receive are  about the size of the reserve and what activities will be allowed. However, I am starting to get questions about the impacts it will have on fishermen and the local economy. It’s good that people are thinking about these issues and that is exactly what the ODFW is trying to figure out right now, but at the same time I can’t give people a straight answer to these questions at the moment.

As I mentioned in my previous post, part of my job at Cascade Head is to look for boats that might be going over the bar from the salmon river into the ocean. After 10 stops of monitoring the ocean area past the salmon river with no sightings, I spotted a small motorboat in the ocean inside the reserve from a top a hill on Wednesday. I was hoping to find the boater when I went back to do my pressure counts at Knight Park later in the day. In order to do this, I asked all the fishermen in the parking lot at Knight park if they had gone into the ocean that day, and they looked at me funny. I got a lot of, “Are you kidding me, going over the bar in this tiny boat, do you think I am crazy?” I was feeling like I was the crazy one for asking and went to go check for boats in the ocean one last time. On my way back a man asked me what I was doing, and when I responded that I was looking for boats he told me that he had just seen a boater go over the bar and into the estuary, and he had just disappeared around the corner. I lept into my car and drove as fast as I could down the gravel road to chase down the boater. When I arrived back at Knight park there was a man pulling his boat out and he confirmed that he had indeed been fishing in the ocean, with a boat about the same size as the other fishermen who were laughing at me for the idea (This made me feel less crazy) . For some reason I think I was too out of breath to give the man a survey, but I did get all his information, so the ODFW can contact him and find out more about his fishing practices. Success!