How Tide Gauges Help Track Flooding and Sea Level Rise in Coastal Towns

1:00:00 I'm very happy to tell you that we have Dr. Andrew Taylor back on the episode today. He's almost become like a correspondent on this show. He's been around so many times this year, but it's great because he's doing so many cool projects and emailed me the other day and he's like, Hey, you know what? You want to talk about tide gauges, put in a tide gauge in his own town, town of St. Michael's in Maryland to look at how flooding is affected or how often it happens and how they can predict and how they can manage, especially when they look at compared to other tide gauges around the Chesapeake Bay where they're in or just off the Chesapeake Bay where they're in. And so we're going to talk about the process, why he's doing this for his town, you know, the time it takes all that kind of stuff that's going in to doing that so that you can become a local hero to your community and do something similar or just do something that will be helpful and feel inspired. So we're going to talk about that on today's episode of the how to protect the ocean podcast.

1:00:50 Let's start the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another exciting episode of the how to protect the ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. And this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. If you haven't noticed by the last few episodes, we've been talking a lot about local heroes, local people who stand up in their community and say, you know what? We need information or we need to ban single use plastics or we need to do this because they're observing stuff in their communities and saying something's wrong here or we need to do something in order to predict or in order to better manage our community. And one of those people, and I know he doesn't like to be called an ocean hero or a local hero, is Dr. Andrew Thayer. He's a local hero to me. He's an inspiration to me and a lot of our other colleagues and friends that we have in our circles. And he just does some great things. He has OpenCTD, which is his own personal project where he helps build instrumentation that is available for a lot of people. And that is crowdfunded on his Patreon, which I'll link to the show notes if you want to take part in that and support him on that. But he also does a lot of things. He's a consultant. He's a contractor. He does deep sea ecology. He does a lot of science communication. He runs Southern Fried Science. He does a lot of everything. And I'll put links to his episodes that he's been on not only this year, but before talking about all those things on this episode, even talked about D and D this year, running D and D games, Dungeons and Dragons games for forest ecology. So we talk a lot about things. Andrew's a good friend of mine. He's always welcome on this podcast. He's a good friend of the podcast.

1:02:16 And today we're talking about him putting a tide gauge into their coastal area to start to detect, you know, all this different stuff that's going on, you know, over a 24 hour period or over a number of like over a year, essentially what he's going to do in this area. And he's going to switch it to a different area within St. Michael's area. Because some areas get flooded and they need to know how often they need to know, you know, what's the implications of that? And they need to know data. They need to get data to do better management. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. And Andrew's always great. So I wanted you to get to know him even more and his project on the tide gauge in St. Michael's Harbor in Maryland. So here's the interview with Dr. Andrew Taylor. Enjoy and I will talk to you after. Hey, Andrew, welcome back to the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. It seems like you're a correspondent now, but you are back again. Are you ready to talk about tide gauges?

1:03:03 Absolutely. I am ready to talk tide gauges. Love it. I love this. This is awesome because it's very rare that I like I get I get emails from people, you know, a lot of times is get like people who represent guests and be like, hey, would you want this person to be on their guests? A lot of times they miss like completely miss. Obviously you and I know each other. We're good friends. You know, we we we kind of chat on a fairly regular basis through email and through social media stuff. And you email me like, hey, you want to talk about tide gauges? I've got like, I think it's like over a month of day. I'm like, yes, yes, please. Let's let's talk about this because I think it's important. And there's a lot of things I think it's important. This is your project that you've kind of headed up for. And what we just discussed for two years, it's been in the making. And now you finally got data from it and you deployed it this year. You got data and you wanted to share. And I want to share the whole journey. Just what people can do in their own towns for the sake of their own towns, whether they live along, they live in the town.

1:03:59 And whether they live along the coastline or they don't live along the coastline. There's things that we need to do to make changes to ensure those changes are done. So I'm looking forward to being able to do that. But Andrew, if people haven't heard of you before, you just let us remind us of who you are and what you do. Absolutely. And thank you for having me back on. One of these days you're going to get sick of me. Never, never, my friend. I think one day we're just going to have to call at the Andrew and Andrew podcast. I feel like at some point because you're on it so many times. I love it. But anyway, I'll see you, my friend. So I am Dr. Andrew Thaler. I am a deep sea ecologist. I'm a conservation technologist. I'm an ocean educator. And because I am a man who wears many, many hats, I am also a climate change commissioner for the town of St.

1:04:41 Michael's. And that's sort of where this bit of the story begins. So almost five years ago now, more than five years ago, because I'm on my second term, I joined the St. Michael's time climate change commission and it is an infrastructure commission for our town to examine the impacts of chronic sea level rise induced flooding on the town infrastructure, develop strategies for how to mitigate that flooding and then put into practice major infrastructure projects for the most part in order to see our vision of a resilient, town that can survive into the next century. I have a couple questions before you go on. Sorry, with this commission, was this already being put in place before you joined or has already been put in place for you? Or was this something that you tried to push to be put in place? So I was not one of the people campaigning for the creation of the commission that happened before I moved to town, but I was one of the founding commissioners. So I have been on the commission since its inception. But I was on the commission.

1:05:41 But I was not part of the push to create the commission. Gotcha. And you are a deep sea ecologist and oceanographer. What made you decide like this is what I want to do? Because a lot of times is what's discussing your you'll discuss it in just a second is, you know, a lot of engineering projects and like, you know, balance and making sure roads are not going to get flooded on a regular basis. What made you decide like, you know what, this is something that I would be good for, like, a lot of people are like, am I really qualified if I if I'm educated in this specific aspect? Like, what made you think, you know what, I could actually do a pretty good job. So, you know, I've done a lot of climate change outreach throughout my career, spanning almost 20 years now. And it became very clear about five years ago that we weren't getting the job done.

1:06:31 That this idea that we could use science communication and science outreach to convince lawmakers to convince legislators to make the right decisions regarding climate change wasn't working. Right. And so there's the alternative to if you cannot convince a lawmaker to adopt scientifically sound principles, then the only thing you can do is become a lawmaker. So I set out to figure out where I could be the most impactful in my community and where my specific set of skills, I have a particular set of skills and where my particular set of skills could be the most use to my community. And, you know, I am a deep sea ecologist, but I also have done a lot of coastal work and I've done a lot of sea level rise modeling. And many, many years ago, I ran a little program called Drown Your Town.

1:07:19 So I am very familiar with modeling sea level rise and changing communities. And so, you know, I it's not like an open election. It's you get nominated by the town commission. So I put in my application with the commissioners of town and they accepted it. And I joined the town of St. Michael's climate change commission for the inaugural commission. And we have been doing a lot of studies to determine where the critical areas are a lot of grant making and grant writing to get the funds to do more studies because a lot of infrastructure work is just more and more studies. And slowly now beginning to put in the funding to actually do some of the heavier lifts. So we have roads in town that need to be raised because they currently flood at high tide.

1:08:09 We have critical areas where major tourist venues are underwater half of the year. And that's obviously not acceptable if you want to have a town that's going to survive into the century. We have a power station, a power substation that handles power transmission for the rest of our peninsula. And in a big storm, the road to that substation is inaccessible. And so we're looking at ways to mitigate the impact on that road. And so it's really, it's a nuts and bolts commission. It's roads. It's stormwater management. It's critical areas. It's putting in reinforced bulkheads or putting in new living shorelines, which we have a living shoreline project that we're in the building phase right now, which is really exciting.

1:08:52 So we're actually going to have like a tangible thing. That's not just a report coming up really soon, which is very, very exciting. But part of all of that is you have to know what the ocean is doing around your town. And we have, you know, the Chesapeake Bay is a very well researched area. We have the University of Maryland. We have several other universities. We've got multiple. You know, no one is headquartered on the Chesapeake Bay. Yeah, Maryland, Maryland Department of Natural Resources done us trying to set up a amount of work. But tides are weird. And I don't think we appreciate just how strange tides are, especially in like the Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary and ecosystem in the continental US.

1:09:41 It's the largest water. It might be the largest watershed, not the largest estuary, but I think it's the largest estuary. You know, even bigger than Mississippi. Yeah, really? Wow, I didn't know that. Estuarian watershed. Estuarian watershed. Gotcha. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I gotcha. Okay. Yeah. Cool. And, you know, it takes 12 hours for a tide to promulgate up the Chesapeake Bay. So if you have high tide in Norfolk, you're going to have another, you know, 11 12 hours before you see a high tide in Baltimore. And that changes depending on where you are in the town of St. Michael is not right in the Chesapeake Bay. We're on the Miles River, which is part of the Chesapeake Bay and is influenced by the Chesapeake Bay. But there's a lot of weird hydrodynamic phenomena that happened between the tide going up in the ocean and that wave promulgating into our area.

1:10:40 And so one of the questions we had is like, so we're dealing with nuisance flooding. We're dealing with high tide flooding. Our mandate is not planning for the next big hurricane. Our mandate is dealing with the chronic flooding that the town has to handle every day. It's, you know, what I like to say is we're here to handle the flooding that you have to live with, not the flooding that you have to run from. Because in a big hurricane, the answer the answer to managing a big hurricane coming through is get out of town, you know, go have some fun in the mountains for the weekend and then come back and rebuild. But with the chronic flooding, the flooding we see every day, you have to be able to live with it or the town can't survive. And so one of my very early on initiatives that I started with the climate commission is I want to know what's happening with our tides in town right now.

1:11:25 We have a tide gauge in Annapolis. We have a tide gauge in Cambridge. Those are both very far away from our town. We have a tide on the other side of the river on the other side of the bay on the bay. Sorry. Yeah, we have a tide gauge in Claiborne, which is a town slightly north of us that was installed in such a way that it bottoms out at low tide. So you don't get accurate readings. And so we really pushed to find a solution that would get us tide readings in our town. And that was like not particularly expensive. We didn't, you know, part of part of working with with small town government is like, you know, you can do almost anything you want as long as it's at no cost to the town.

1:12:05 Yeah. And so as you know, I have this little program called the open CTD. The open CTD is a low cost open source oceanographic instrument that gives you salinity, temperature and depth. And one of the things I was thinking of doing is, okay, we can measure depth. Depth is tied if you have a fixed gauge. So can we convert the open CTD to a long term fixed mooring and use the data coming out of that device to then infer what the tides are doing in our town locally. And fortunately, I'm very good friends with the folks at so far ocean who make those amazing spotter buoys. And they had opened up a program called the bristlemouth program, the bristlemouth pioneer program and bristlemouth is their attempt at a universal standard connector for ocean equipment.

1:12:58 So that like, you know, right now, you know, if I have an open CTD and someone has like a ysi castaway and someone has like a big adcp and someone's got a bunch of other data sans every single one of those has a different kind of connector. And if you want those to talk to each other, it's basically impossible. So the idea behind bristlemouth is if there's one universal full ocean capable connector, that's relatively cheap, that every device can talk to, then we can start integrating these ocean systems. And so the town of St. Michael's was accepted into the bristlemouth pioneer program. And then I got to have the joy of integrating the open CTD with with the bristlemouth standard. And I don't know if you know the joke in software standards, but like, you know, if you go into a program, you're like, oh, there's like 15 different language standards, we should normalize this so that we can like make it easy for all these different codes to talk to each other.

1:13:49 Then all of a sudden you have 16 different software standards. And then the next person comes in is like, oh, we should normalize this. And then you have 17 different standards. So it took about a year for me to get the open CTD integrated with with the spotter buoy. And then finally, this December, we deployed our buoy out in St. Michael's Harbor and began logging the tides. Okay, so now, so you've, you know, you spent a year coding this thing to make sure that it speaks to the open CTD, which is which is awesome, because that's something that was necessary to make sure that, you know, you can get your information in there, like, you know, from from the CTD that you had. But this is a lot of stuff, you know, like, did the commission know about all this, these plans, or is this a program that you looked up and you knew about it, you know, and then shared it with the commission? Like, how did it how was this program made available or made known to the commission?

1:14:45 So I knew from so far when they put out the announcement that they were looking for bristlemouth pioneers. And then because municipal municipal government is always about meetings, right? You know, there, there is a long process of having meetings and holding meetings. And kind of the joke I was making with so far is that I had the hardware ready to go. Well, well ahead of when we actually deploy it, but I had to wait for a town council meeting so that I could then petition the town for permission to put this buoy in this particular spot. And then the town had to vote on where the buoy would go. And, you know, there's a municipal process because we're a community. So, you know, the coding and the hardware was maybe not even the most logistically complicated part of it. It's the getting people on board and talking to everyone and then getting, you know, the actual live feed up on the website. So website.

1:15:34 So part of all this is we launched St. Michael's flood watch, which is St. Michael flood watch.com. And it just redirects to an ArcGIS story map because as re is great for stuff like that. The story maps have really have really taken by a lot of people. I know a lot of people do that. What's that website again? Can you just say that again? So it's st. Michael's flood watch.com and that's St. Abbreviated just ST. Yeah, Michael's flood watch. And so on that website, you see the sea level rise projections that we're working with as part of the commission. So when we do all of our planning, we're planning for five feet of flooding above mean sea level. We have a lot of projections about what that flooding looks like in reality over the years. So like in 2020, we saw 35 two foot floods by 2036. We expect to see 118 per tide. So that's, you know, two tides a day. By 2075, we expect every high tide to be above two feet.

1:16:31 So that gives you kind of a projection of what we're really looking for. And it also emphasizes that sea level rise is a process. You know, we talk about, oh, what's it going to look like in 2050 or 2100? But in reality, we should be talking about like, how much is going to change over the next five years, over the next 10 years, you know, what is chronic flooding going to actually look like to the people who have to live with it. And like, how does that impact things like the businesses that are on the waterfront there over time? So, you know, a five foot flood may not be particularly catastrophic, because we only see it once or twice in the next 50 years. But, you know, a four foot, a four foot flood isn't that much less than five feet. And, you know, by 2075, we'll be seeing that every sixth high tide.

1:17:19 So things like that, I think really matter. And then if you keep going down the website, you get to the real time feed from the buoy. And this is where all the this is real time data. This is coming directly from our buoy. Last 24 hours that I'm reading here, right? The last 24 hours. And you can see, unfortunately, if we had done this yesterday, you would have seen three two foot floods in a row. So we had three flood tides in a row over the last week, which was the first set of flood tides we've documented with the buoy since we put it out. And I just want to clarify, too, when we talk about flood tides, we're talking a little bit about the height, but also the distance that it goes, right? Like how far in does it go? Like so you have your regular shoreline.

1:18:00 And if you if people go, I highly recommend if you're if you're watching this or you're listening to this, I highly recommend that you actually it's easier if you follow along if you go to say Michael's flood watch. I'll put the link in the in the show notes so people can follow along. But because you see the first picture of I think was May 9th, it looks like you can see that there's like bridges that are pretty much flooded rows that are pretty much flooded. And it looks like a typical day. You know what I mean? Like it's it's kind of it's it's a little scary to think that this is a normal thing that happened. So going back to that when we talk about height. So when I look at this tide gauge, it's saying depth from mean sea level, I assume is MSL. Yes. And, you know, we're looking at zero to what seems to be between 1.6 and 1.8 feet, just a little over 1.6 feet.

1:18:50 And you can actually interact with the map and you can actually it'll give you what it was. It's yes, six, seven, I think was the highest in the last 24 hours, just last 20. And what you'll notice from this one is that none of the low tides go below mean sea level. They don't. So that's crazy. Cool. That's because we've had a bunch of storms recently. And that's another issue is that rainfall highly mediates. Like we don't have your sides like a tidal variance around here should be about a foot. And so, you know, a big rainstorm can completely change the tidal cycle for several, several cycles. Yeah. So when we just go back to that, when we talk about like the depth, is that the so you have the mean sea level, say at zero, like which is where you would see on average, the sea level. Are we talking about this is 1.6 feet above above means.

1:19:38 So it's not. But with it going higher, it'll actually it will also go further up the coastline. Is that like the like the further into town and yeah, it goes further and further into town. So the higher goes the further goes into town. Yeah. The other thing I want to make, I want to note is that St. Michael's is not necessarily like I was just looking up a map of St. Michael's because as much as long as we've known each other, I've never actually looked up, you know, where you actually live within the bay. Right. It's a it's it seems like it's protected from the bay itself and from where the ocean comes in. Almost on the other side of the land mass that comes in. So the fact that it's flooding and it's still protected in a way, you know, from like actual ways coming in from the ocean proper.

1:20:26 That's kind of scary too, right? Because now it's just a matter of the volume of water filling up into this into the bay that you're into, like the river that you go into. It's just sheer volume of coming up plus rain that comes in from the top. Does that play a role in how scary this is for you? Like or for the town? So yes, no, I wouldn't use the term scary, right? Because we're looking about building a resilient community. And one of the reasons I'm committed to the climate change commission is because St. Michael's is actually very well positioned to be resilient to climate change. If you look at our flood maps, it's not, you know, it's got enough elevation to it that most of the town isn't flooding.

1:21:07 Right. It's a lot of the businesses tend to be the ones that are affected right now. And of course, that has major implications for the survivability of the town. But the town itself is relatively well protected. It's got great potential for building resilient infrastructure. There are communities on the US, on the on the Maryland Eastern Shore that are, there's nothing you can do. You're like, like, they are so low lying. Parts of them are already below sea level. Like, there isn't really, there is no resilience building for some communities. Some communities are just going to have to move. St. Michael's is not one of them. So I you know, I look at all this stuff and I look at them and it's hopeful because it's, you know, it's a community that has the potential to build for resilient future and it's a community that's doing that.

1:21:53 So it's a town that decided they wanted a climate change commission. I think we were the first town on the Maryland Eastern Shore to say we want a specific municipal body that is there to address climate change. We have, you know, the topology of the town is right to build resilient infrastructure. You can see there's a lot of towns further down the peninsula from us that have to you have to go through St. Michael's to get to. So, you know, St. Michael's is kind of the gateway to the rest of the Bay hundred, which is what our area is called, because a hundred is a colonial term for an amount of land that has enough population that you can raise a hundred able bodied men for a militia.

1:22:36 Oh, the Maryland Eastern Shore was separated into hundreds back in the day. We're we're one of the last areas that still refers to ourselves as the bay hundred as the bay hundred. Okay, interesting. So that's that's why it's called the bay hundred. But the rest of the bay hundred depends on St. Michael's for access. So if St. Michael's goes down, then a lot of other communities fail to. So it's a very kind of critical area to address. Now, when going through the climate commission and doing the studies and, you know, doing a project like this, was there much resistance to from from other citizens who maybe are not always for doing work in climate change?

1:23:17 Or was this, hey, we're actually getting flooded here. This is something that's concerning whether we call it what we can call it whatever we want. This is just concerning. I'm just curious in terms of like the feedback that you and the commission got and the government got. Yeah. So just to give you some context, you know, Maryland is a very progressive state in general. The Maryland Eastern Shore is generally not. We're sort of the red district in a sea of blue. But we're also a coastal community and we're a community that relies on the water and, you know, people are not blind to what's actually happening in front of them. So, you know, there are a few constituents who say, hey, we don't want to deal with climate change. We don't want to think about it. For the most part, we have an incredible amount of support from the town, from the town commission and from the community at large.

1:24:07 And, you know, what I like to say when people say, all right, well, why do we need to worry about this is like, look, you know, my job is not to convince you that climate change is real. My job is to make sure that an ambulance can get to your house at the middle of high tide on a sunny day. And right now we had three high tides in a row where that was not possible. So, you know, regardless of what your personal beliefs are regarding the science of climate change, which climate change is real and is happening in itself.

1:25:00 And so to get into start a new seems and a filler for the long time starts to happen. And because climate change is you know? I racism is what the future. Something like that to us. Was Whiskey called challenged over a bug looking at really ELEac's Why are areas like the people we check wanting to meet run state like freestyle field and then Internalenzie Conway who's also' information, you know, we're looking at this story map, which kind of gives us enlightens us in terms of, you know, what it is like, I'm looking at, or it looks like what a what a great crab and steakhouse that's pretty much underwater or the rounded it's underwater. So the crab, crab and steak, steak, crab claw, there is a, oh, actually, I think the picture of this crab and steak claw, they've changed the name. But one of them is a restaurant called the crab claw. Okay. And they, at one point, their front, their lower level was underwater. So consistently that they made it like an experience. So you could go have crabs in the bay, you know, sit at the picnic table and the bay would be coming up with the high tide while you're eating your crabs and you can just toss your refuse right into the water. That's that's adaptation, I guess.

1:25:47 I mean, you know, it's adaptation, it's resilience hits. Yeah, it's a declaration that like, we're acknowledging the problem, we're going to deal with it as we can. They are in the process of raising their lower deck and doing a whole retrofit to make it passable again. Yeah, there were a lot of venues that were underwater. One of former climate change commissioner ran one of the tour boats out of town. And he did a very good job of keeping records of how often his dock was inaccessible. And it went from in 2010, his dock was inaccessible because of flooding four days a year, five days a year, I think it's back in 2010. Yeah, so I've got let me make sure I'm got the right numbers.

1:26:32 Yeah, so in 2010, it was obstructed six times during the year. And in 2022, his dock was obstructed 44 times. So these are, you know, these are business owners who are keeping track of what's happening and are noticing that like that impacts his bottom line that 44 times a year, customers could not get to his business. That's unreal. Now it's kind of interesting because it's data that matters to his business. So he's looking at it. He's trying to figure out ways to adapt to it to figure out ways to change. It's really interesting how the story map is laid out here because you know, you've got, I think it's like nine different sites here that are different streets and talking about how frequently, you know, they're, they're underwater and you see the pictures that come up of them underwater, you know, a San Domingo Creek, you've got Chester Park Lane to North Street, so you've got you've got it like pretty much laid out of what is what could happen and and the people who are from St. Michael's have probably seen this and they probably know about it's probably a topic of discussion in terms of roads are out or so forth. So it becomes really important. Now, the time going back to the tide gauge in that, you know, that's an exciting project to have.

1:27:44 And I think it's really important to get the data, but obviously data feeds into better management at the end. So you have this in there. It's been in there since December 2024. What do you want or what are you hoping and what is the commission hoping to get out of it? So there's really three key things that we want to learn from the tide gauge. And I will say that this is not a permanent structure. The ultimate goal is to prove that the town of St. Michael's needs its own dedicated title station that's supported by NOAA or the USGS. And that's that's an expensive proposition. That's a proposition that requires a lot of grant making. And so having that data ahead of time is key to that. So part of that is demonstrating that our tides are out of cycle enough that we need our own tide station.

1:28:26 We want to have documentation of each flooding event so that we can say as the years progress like in 2025 we had X number of two foot floods and an X number of five foot floods. Hopefully we only have one but you know, we usually get at least one five foot flood a year. So we can actually show the community like, hey, look, we're tracking this in real time now, like we've got the data and we can show the accumulation of more and more flooding because, you know, the infrastructure projects we're working on are not short projects. These all have five, 10, 15 year time horizons. And I think one of the big projects we're working on that's that's going to get a good bit of resilience to 2050 is probably a 20 year project. So we'll be done just in time for 2050. But it's a major infrastructure build and has a tremendous amount of potential.

1:29:19 And I think one of the things that we want to know, we want to know how often the floods are happening and we want to have those documented. We also want to know how out of phase St. Michael's is with the other tide stations in our area because that has major ramifications for planning. If we know storm is coming, if we know there's a big surge, if we know we're about to get a ton of rainfall, we are as of now and I haven't done the full cycle analysis for the data we have. Because I'm waiting on just getting a few more months before we do that because title cycles are also seasonal. But at the moment, we are anywhere from 20 minutes ahead to 40 minutes behind the tide station up the bay from us, which means we're I mean, that that is an hour range.

1:30:05 That is the difference between saying a flood is going to arrive at six or flood is going to arrive at seven. And so knowing exactly how out of phase we are with with those other tide stations really helps for things like emergency planning. It helps for things like knowing when to launch your boat. It helps for things like knowing when to maintain the buoy because I maintain the buoy by going in in chest waders. And if the tide is 1.6 feet above mean sea level, I am going to be swamped and if it's 0.4 feet above mean sea level, I can tend to the buoy. Yeah, yeah. If it's 1.6 that you have you have water in your.

1:30:49 So this is super interesting that the data here helps you make better management decisions from the commission sake and from the city sake or the town sake. And then are people interested now? Like, are they looking at the map? Like, are they looking online? Are they talking to you about it? You know, obviously, I know you have kids programs around it, too. There's a there's a picture view with and a couple of adults that with with like some kids and stuff. Is this something that people are are interested in and interested in the data? Yeah, so the town is very involved. They're working on getting the tide charts up on the official town website as well. Nice. That is also a process because usable governance is always a process and process is important.

1:31:31 We do do a lot of work with kids. So the the St. Michael's Girl Scout troop 799 has been very involved in this process. They were out there for the first deployment. The buoy is actually also a time capsule. So they all made little bits of art and wrote letters to the buoy and put it inside. So when we pull the buoy in a year, they'll get to see all their stuff. Oh, that's really hopefully won't be all soggy. They were they were they were out there for the deployment. And I will say that in the true spirit of rogue marine science, we decided before I realized you could just walk out in chest waiters. Yeah. Because I didn't have a buoy out there to tell me how deep it was. Right.

1:32:13 We decided to do the initial deployment in a canoe. Okay. And so all of the the dads of the scout troop piled into I had one of those big aluminum grumman commute canoes loaded up the buoy with 50 pounds of ballast because that's what's weighing it down at the bottom. Right. And then we paddled out to the middle of honeymoon lagoon and then proceeded to completely flip the canoe. Well, all the girl scouts were watching their dads just get soaked. And I think that's important. I think it is important for kids to see their parents make big mistakes and laugh it off. Yeah, 100%. That's fun. That was fun.

1:32:54 There's video online if you can find it. I think I said it to the tune of Yaketty Saxe of us doing the buoy deployment and flipping the canoe at the same time. I'll send you a link to that because that is the real story. That's the real story. You know what? That might have to be the next clip. Your clips do well. I feel like that's going to be the next clip. You know, of you talking in the background and doing that. I think that'll be that'll be great. Now, one thing that's that's always great about projects like this is that you can almost duplicate it or do similar studies elsewhere, not necessarily in your well, actually, I should ask first, do you plan on putting more buoys out there or is it just this one here is going to be the one that gives you the information that you need.

1:33:34 Yeah, this is this is my buoy and the plan is for it to stay out there for a year. And then we're going to move it to other priority sites and do similar analysis at other priority sites. However, because it is built on the open CTD, which is 100% open source platform and is built on the bristlemouth communication standard, which is 100% open source communication standard. So it's very easy to integrate your own buoy with one of these tide gauges anywhere that you want on the on the website. You'll find a link to the GitHub repository. If you're the kind of person that likes GitHub repositories. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we've got all the source code there for the the tide gauge itself for the communication protocol to get it talking to bristlemouth.

1:34:23 And we have to rebuild some libraries for the microcontroller that we're using. And we have the source code up for the tide chart too. So if you want to implement this in your own town, it is ready to go. It is plug and play. I say plug and play. It is plug and play if you know how to use a soldering iron. So the opposite of plug and play. But it is the main implementation challenges have been handled. So if you want to do this in your own town and you have access to a so far spotter buoy, which is kind of the limiting factor there because the spotter is not a factor there because the spotter buoys aren't particularly cheap, but they're not super expensive either for a town. We can really put these anywhere. And the spotter platform is tough. I mean, I'm sure you've seen the videos of them dropping spotter buoys into Hurricane Helene. Yes. So they are they are durable. They take a beating up minus currently very biofouled. So I'm gonna have to go out this weekend and give this scrub. But other than that, it is, it is a robust little little buoy.

1:35:22 And we're hoping that the gauge holds for the entire year. I may have to go out and do some repairs because of course I'm also testing some experimental hardware with it as well. But of course you are. Everything is as one as one. Andrew Thaler does as one does if you're Andrew Thaler. Yeah, for sure. So this is interesting that, you know, a couple of weeks ago I had on the people from the Center of American American Progress. You know, a good friend of ours, Angela Villa Gomez, Dalia Haddia, came on the podcast, talked about near shore conservation. And this is really a form of near shore conservation like looking at where you live in your local community, helping lead it, you know, providing information, providing connections and your expertise as well as along with along with other people within the commission and working with government. But essentially being like this, I know you probably don't like being called this, but like this ocean hero for that community to just be like, look, I'm gonna have to do this.

1:36:15 I love where people are. It's a tool I set out here to bed, but it's it's a tool I set out. Let's feel good. Anyway, this is the sort of community who I listen to that, here, I happened to be doing this live on the podcast. They may not have a PhD, they may not have a master's, they may not have a degree in marine biology or any kind of aquatic biology. What would you recommend they do to maybe not take on a particular project like this or maybe do take on a particular project, but kind of lead or help lead these types of initiatives in their own area, their own local community?

1:37:07 I mean, you know, the line I've been saying for a while now is local government, local government, local government. If you care about how your community is developing, if you care about the future of your town or your neighborhood or your city, right now the best thing you can do is to figure out where in the municipal structure of your government that your skills and your passions can be applied and run for positions. You know, towns have waterways boards, towns have wetlands commissions, towns have planning and zoning commissions. Most of them don't require a ton of expertise and a lot of them you'll go and you'll look at the people who are actually making decisions and being like, how did they end up there?

1:37:48 Yeah. You know, so finding roles to play in your local government, because that's really where the rubber hits the road for a lot of these things. You know, you hear about big federal initiatives to address climate change. And when you look at what those actually entail, those entail giving grants to states, which then give grants to counties, which then give grants to local projects and local municipalities. And so getting on the ground in your local government, getting involved in your local community, it doesn't have to be formal government, it can be kind of the informal government as well. You can join an NGO, you can, you know, I serve on our county's library board as well. So it can be things like that. But, you know, at this point, at this moment in history, you know, the best thing you can do is get yourself into a position where you can make decisions.

1:38:35 Yeah. Yeah, I love it. I think it's great. I think it's a perfect way to end this podcast. Andrew, this has always been a pleasure to have you on. Love how you're taking a lead. I love how you're helping out your town and yourself learning more and more every day. And I think it's really important, though, to set up something like this for a local action, doing all the work. I know it doesn't. It's not as if it's done overnight. It takes a long time. It takes a lot of time to dedicate and a lot of thought process. And so really do appreciate what you're doing for for the town of St. Michael's, but also for our community here on. I really appreciate it. And of course, love to have you back on. Thank you so much for having me. I'm sure I'll be back.

1:39:18 Absolutely. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you, Andrew, for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. It was always great to have you on. Can't wait to have you back, which you never know might be next week. I don't know. Every time he comes up, he's like, you want to talk about this? I'm like, absolutely. I do want to talk about this. And you can tell he doesn't like being called Ocean Hero, but he is a local hero. He does things because he executes. That's the one thing that's the difference between a lot of people. I was talking to him after we recorded and I said, hey, you know what? Like there's all these times where you can jump on commissions. You can jump on meetings and local meetings and government and all this kind of stuff, even just extra critters stuff like, hey, we should talk about this kind of stuff. And you can talk and talk and talk. But until you execute, you don't really get stuff done.

1:39:59 And that happens a lot within our field. That happens in any field. Any business or anything like that. And the fact is, Andrew executes and he likes to share what he's done and what he's been able to do and hopefully inspire you to stand up for your local community and be like, hey, we need this either a tide gauge or we need something else that's important or we need to ban something or we need to talk to our people about something. It's important to feel that inspiration and to watch other people go through what they've done and you can learn from their challenges and how they overcame them and from their successes and how they got there. This was obviously a long term thing for Andrew. It's something that took two years to just put the gauge in the water and get it all approved. You know, government, especially municipal government, work slow as it should. That's the way it does.

1:40:39 They make sure they dot their eyes and cross their T's, but it does take a while and you have to be patient. And once you get it, you have to just continue and be persistent. And then now you've got data and you've got this nice story map and you've got information as great way of communicating to the local town of St. Michael's as well as other places. So let's use this as a model of what you can do in your own area. I'd love to hear from you. Just go to speak up for blue dot com forward slash contact and fill out the form. Let me know what project you're working on.

1:41:26 That format, it goes right to my personal email. I'll answer you back and plan something if you want to come on the podcast and talk about it. Not no worries. You don't have to just want to hear about your project. But I want to thank you, Andrew, again. And I want to thank you guys for listening. This is always great to help support and projects, but also to help support the podcast by listening and sharing with friends and family that you think will get a lot of value out of this. So I really do appreciate if you want to get a hold of me, go to the website, speak up blue dot com forward slash contact. Leave a comment in the YouTube video for watching this on YouTube. And if you're listening to this on Apple podcast or your favorite podcast app, just hit me up on Instagram at how to protect the ocean. That's at how to protect the ocean. I want to thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the how to protect the ocean podcast from the true North strong free.

1:42:07 I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.