CINEMar/Open Ocean Aquaculture Annual Progress Report for the period 1/01/03 through 12/31/03

Principal Investigator(s): James D. Irish and Walter Paul

I. Accomplishments
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has been collaborating with the UNH Open Ocean Aquaculture Program for over four years. A close working relationship has developed between the WHOI group and the UNH OOA team during this time. This kind of teamwork is essential for the development of such complex mooring and monitoring systems as proposed for the Offshore Aquaculture developments being conducted at the Isle of Shoals site.

A. Scheduled Tasks
Each task undertaken during the past year depended largely on UNH direction, followed UNH priorities, and differed from what was proposed two years earlier. The work has continued to evolve and become more defined as more information is obtained about the mooring and feeding systems as they are studied and time history accumulates, and the work will continue to evolve during this coming year and into the next. The main WHOI contributions during the past year are:

1. Monitoring of the behavior of the compliant elastic feed hose with conductors for mooring the small feeding buoy. This hose was developed specially for this program and involved several innovative conductor designs to create a compliant hose with the required stretch, strength and conductor capability.
2. Design of a larger feed buoy mooring system utilizing compliant elastic hoses and a new feed hose with electrical conductors for increased monitoring requirements.
3. Continued deployment/improvements of the environmental monitoring mooring with telemetry, and the improvement of the technique for determining the wave statistics from the observed acceleration records.
4. Deployment of the environmental monitoring mooring in Aug 2003 with a high sample rate on all sensors to observe Internal Solitary Waves at the OOA site.
5. Continued collaboration with Dave Fredriksson on the analysis and publication of previous monitoring operations on mooring tension, wave and current forcing and fish cage and mooring response.
6. Feed buoy controller and software system rework for controlling the smaller, first feed buoy, and the development and testing of new software for controlling and testing the new 1-ton feed buoy.
7. Advice to UNH researchers on materials, established technology and methodology for mooring systems and materials.

B. Progress on Tasks
1) Monitoring conditions on Feed Buoy:
Feed Hose Load Cell - in order to determine if the modeling and operation of the feed hose mooring of the small feed buoy was within design limits when deployed, a custom made load cell (Figure 1) was constructed by Sensing Systems Corp. of New Bedford, MA. This load cell was mounted on the bottom of the buoy and the feed hose attached to it.

The load cell was unique because it had a 4” hole in the center for the feed to pass through to the fish cage. The compliant hose was designed and constructed (see Irish and Paul, 2003 last year’s report) at the end of last year, and was successfully deployed at the start of this year. The tensions in the hose (Figure 2) were monitored by the load cell and telemetered to shore via spread spectrum radio. The measured tensions were in the expected range ­ from near 0 at low tide and current and increase to 1000 to 2000 lbs at high tide. These are well within the design working load of the feed hose. As Figure 2 shows, the changes in tension are closely related to the predicted tidal elevation (on the same plot) as expected. Further, tests and detailed analysis of the observed tensions relative to tidal height and currents will be undertaken next year

System Status Monitoring - Besides the feed hose tension, the data system also sampled a series of points (voltages, currents drawn, etc.) to monitor the status of the feed buoy. However, the usefulness of these data is in question because the data lines appear noisy. Unfortunately, no time was allocated for full system integrated testing, and we had to work overtime during the end of the holiday season 2002 to complete the hardware and software before the system was deployed. Software modifications were made and tests run through the winter, but it wasn’t until the buoy was taken out of service while the mooring grid was reconfigured (summer 2003) that we were able to complete the testing and repair of the system to get it to where is was working as designed. The experience gained was incorporated into the design of the new 1-ton feed buoy controller system.

2) Feed Buoy Mooring
The small feed buoy was moored in the fish cage grid by the feed hose (attached to the fish cage), and two compliant elastics (attached to two grid corners). This three point mooring was recommended as the solution to mooring the feed buoy so that at low tide with high storm waves, the bottom of the feed buoy could drop below the top of the fish cage and the elastics would pull the feed buoy over toward a grid corner so that it wouldn’t collide with the top of the fish cage. The elastics also allow the feed buoy to rise with the high waves at high tide and stretch the feed hose. This mooring system has worked well during the past year as predicted. There were indications that the compliant elastic tethers were stretched more than desired on the open Gulf of Maine side of the grid, but this in no way threatened the integrity of the mooring system. The elastics need to be stretched much more to reach failure tensions.

The new 1-ton feed buoy mooring system and feed delivery design is different with the new 4-cage grid system. Preliminary design work was started, but there are some conflicting design criteria on conductors in the feed hose and system geometry that limits the mooring options and greatly increases the component tensions that have not been properly worked out, and discussions continue into next year to resolve these issues.

3) Feed Hose with conductors
The small system feed hose is a unique design with electrical conductors molded into the rubber structure of the feed hose. Because the feed hose must stretch with the tides and currents, the electrical conductors must also stretch (which copper doesn’t like to do without failing). Therefore, special design of unique conducting cables, and their incorporation into the feed hose was done for this project and the hose constructed (see Irish and Paul, 2003 - last year’s report). During the past year this hose as been in service and the conductors have provided power down to two video cameras, sent video signals up from the cameras imaging the fish in the cage to the data system in the feed buoy, and also carried environmental information on temperature and conductivity in the cage from a SeaCat. That the conductors in this hose have worked well during the past year has proven that the design was successful, and can be used in future feed hoses to electrically connect the submerged feed cage to the surface buoy.

The addition of conductors in a compliant mooring component such as the stretch feed hose is an emerging technology. The added requirement imposed this year for coaxial cables to connect fish locating hydrophones on the fish cage makes the present construction unusable. The hose manufacturing methodology developed for the small feed buoy hose, is not adequate, as the conductors were specially designed to allow for some stretch in the wire bundle without stretching the individual copper wires themselves by helixing the individual wires around a central core, then helixing these bundles around the stretch hose during construction. Finding a suitable coaxial cable (which is considerably larger in diameter than the previous conductors), that is capable of being heated in the oven during curing of the rubber in the stretch hose is proving elusive. The search for components continues, and has been delayed by emergency surgery required by Walter Paul, but work is continuing slowly and will continue next year.

4) Data Analysis
Environmental Monitoring Mooring - As part of the continuing collaborative effort, WHOI and UNH are maintaining an environmental monitoring mooring at the OOA site. This mooring has sensors measuring waves (with a three axis strap down accelerometer), water temperatures and salinities (with SeaCats at 1, 22 and 53 meters depth), water velocity profiles (with an ADCP) and fluorormeter, optical backscattering and dissolved oxygen observations at 22 meters depth. Detailed reports are described in the section “Open Ocean Aquaculture, Moored Environmental Observations for 2003.”

Improvements were started this year to add air temperature, photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) and telemetry from deep sensors on the mooring. An amplifier for the air temperature and PAR is now in hand and will be added to the system during the winter 2003-04 servicing. The coil cord around the compliant elastic is also ready to interface with the sensors and buoy, and will be tested in the spring 2004 deployment.

5) Analysis and reporting of previous fish cage monitoring studies.
Load Cells and Mooring Tensions - As part of a Saltonstall-Kennedy funded effort to extend the monitoring and modeling developments that UNH and WHOI have been conducting at the UNH-OOA site to an existing commercial salmon farm (Heritage Salmon in Eastport, ME), the load cells used in 2001 and 2002 at the UNH-OOA site were checked and refurbished at Sensing Systems Corporation. A major problem was found with the strain gauge amplifiers used in the first deployments, and those were changed. There was also some cabling/connector damage that was repaired, and a couple of leakage problems fixed. The strain gauges in the load cells were found to be in good shape. The overall systems were in such poor condition that we could not do any reliable post cruise calibrations to help check for zero offsets or drifts in the data. The load cells in the NW, SW and SE corners of the Northern cage mooring were single load cell systems (load cell and diver serviceable recorder), and not the four load cell system mounted on a grid corner ring as in the NE corner, so were less subject to damage during deployment. The data obtained from two deployments in 2001 and 2002 was normalized using pre-deployment calibrations and the results statistically analyzed. The tensions were sampled every three hours for 20 minutes at 8 Hz. The mooring anchors were positioned so that most of the load of the fish cage was being born by the SW and SE anchors and lines. As the SE corner was the most exposed to the open Gulf of Maine and storm waves, the results from that analysis are shown in Figure 4. The red curve is the mean or average tension in each 20-minute burst sample, and is what was previously shown in our data report (Irish et al, 2001) to illustrate the data recovered. However, the mean tension is not the most critical to the study of mooring failure or for mooring design. The blue line is the maximum tension in each burst that shows the highest single point tension in each 20-minute burst. The green line is the minimum or lowest single point tension in each burst. The cyan curve at the bottom is the standard deviation of each burst, and represents the variations during the burst, which is related to the local wave field. No points were edited out of this analysis, because there were none that were “obviously” bad ­ that is a single point that is out of line with the rest of the points in a burst.

The larger fluctuations seen in the blue, red and green curves (especially the blue) are due to the tides and weather forced oscillations. It is easy to see the weather fluctuations that cause higher tensions in the maximum (red) and standard deviation (cyan) records. The major jump in behavior in early March is the 50-year storm that broke the counter weight off the fish cage, and the cage rose to the surface and saw increased tensions. Then in early Aril a new counter weight was attached and the cage put in the “down” position, and the tension and variations decreased. It is clear that with the fish cages in the down or submerged position, the forcing on the fish cages is greatly reduced in both maximum and standard deviation.

The overall decrease in tension with time throughout the record is due to overall drift of the load cells (thought to be small, but could not be checked with post-deployment calibrations) and the creep in the mooring lines with applied tension (which is normal and expected). The high frequency “noise” observed superimposed on the weather forced signal is really tidal variations. It is interesting that the peaks in the tension always come with the peaks in the tide so that it is the combination of weather forced currents and tides that cause the peaks in the tensions observed. In the current record (see Irish and Paul, 2003) the tides are only on the order of 5 cm/sec while the weather forced currents are on order 40 cm/sec, and much larger, but when the weather forced currents have tensioned the system, the tides add that last lit of current that makes the large peaks observed.

During the servicing and deployment of the load cells in the fish cage grid (Irish, et al 2000), the anchors were deployed in a “relaxed” grid mode with the corner floats at the surface. After the mooring system was fully assembled and the fish cage in place, the SE anchor was towed to about the expected position and the NW anchor was towed out until the mooring grid was at about the proper depth. Then the NE anchor was pulled out until it appeared the cage was just being pulled down. The SW anchor was not pulled into position, so the grid was tight on the NW-SE direction, and the tensions in the NW anchor line (Figure 4) are higher than in the SW anchor line (Figure 5). This is similar to a bow, where any pull on the bowstring causes high tensions on the ends. So any movement of the cage when it is moored at two points (NW-SE) causes the tension in those two directions to increase over the tensions in the NE and SW anchors. Thus, the geometry is different from that modeled, and as it was not possible to exactly predict the positions of the anchors on the bottom to compare results between models and reality. Another feature of this two-point mooring is the nature of the signal. When a current event occurs, the minimum tension in Fig. 3 generally rises with the mean and maximum, but in the anchor line not taking the major share of the tension (Figure 5), the minimum decreases when the maximum increases. Another observation is that there is a general drop in tension in the system after the end of year 2000 storm. The is the first major storm after deployment and it can only be assumed that the mooring really “set” the anchors, or dragged them a bit to cause this lower overall mooring grid tension.

Toward the end of next year, these load cells will be deployed in the new four cage mooring system now at the UNH-OOA site to observe the tensions in the mooring lines in relationship to the wave and current forcing measured by the environmental monitoring mooring.

Continuing analysis of these data and additional data from the fish cage motion and forcing in comparison will continue during this year and continue into next with new data in close collaboration with Dr. Dave Fredriksson at UNH. Initial analysis has produced two papers that appeared in print this past year discussing (1) the vertical heave response of the central spar type of fish cage to wave forcing (Fredriksson et al., 2003b) and (2) fish cage dynamics modeling and observation comparisons. (Fredriksson et al., 2003a). Also, the design of the environmental mooring was presented at the IEEE Seventh Working Conference on Current Measurement in March (Irish and Fredriksson, 2003a) and at the Oceans’03 conference in September (Irish and Fredriksson, 2003b). The student poster that won an award at Oceans’02 was subsequently published in the MTS newsletter (Michel et al., 2003). Finally, a poster on the environmental moorings as an observatory was presented and discussed at the August RARGOM (Regional Association for Research in the Gulf of Maine) meeting.

6) Feed Buoy Controllers
Small Feed Buoy Controller - A major part of the work done this past year has been on feed buoy controller systems. This comprised the software development started last year for the smaller feed buoy and continuing this year with the 1-ton feed buoy (see below). The controller system was evolved as the feed buoy mechanical and electrical components were acquired and tested. They system was deployed as soon as all the components were assembled, before any integrated testing could be done. Still, the system did work, and did feed the fish. However, there were problems with the power (recharging the batteries by the solar panel and wind generator - see Figure 6) that were slowly ironed out while the buoy was in position in collaboration with Stan Boduch of UNH who undertook the responsibility of most of the hardware repair and testing. All the first order problems were finally addressed when the buoy was temporarily removed from service when the mooring grid was reconfigured in the summer of 2003 and we were able to remove the main components and set them out on a bench and easily trace and repair hardware and software problems. Then the system was reassembled and appears to be reliably working. However, the diagnostic information is still poor because of a continuing noise problem, probably related to running high current drain motors and systems. After the feed buoy was redeployed it appeared to be working properly as designed and efforts shifted to the larger feed buoy controller. The telemetry on this buoy worked fairly reliably during the year, which allowed us to monitor feeding operations. However, without a base control station set up to automatically check the daily messages, considerable time was spent doing this, or ignoring the hourly messages at the expense of not catching any problem. A Control Central is under discussion and, as soon as the 1-ton feed buoy is deployed, full development will start as a joint effort with UNH and WHOI.

1-Ton Feed Buoy Controller - Experience with the small feed buoy during the past two years has aided the development of the controller for the larger feed buoy. Controlling the feeding at user-selected times is reliably done by both controllers. The additional effort this year was put into the diagnostics and system status that will allow better control and operation off the aquaculture operation from shore. This work was conducted in close collaboration with Stan Bocuch who was responsible for the electrical and mechanical assembly of the controller system. WHOI discussed options and approaches, and assisted in this design. When the funding for the new proposed work arrived, UNH had completed most of the construction, and had outlined the software approach required.

UNH had also constructed a test assembly for the CF1 controller in the small feed buoy that was useful in monitoring the logic lines controlled directly by the Persistor, and UNH had also constructed a distribution panel for the Persistor U4S serial port boards to allow Weeder A/D, Digital Input and Output and Relays to be controlled. By combining Weeder boards purchased for development by WHOI and for spares by UNH, a development system was assembled at WHOI that allowed us to develop and test software, and e-mail test and operation versions to UNH for field-testing.

The software has a basic interrupt timer that alerts the system to check its status every 13 seconds. This checks to see if:

1. The emergency shutdown switch has been pushed in the buoy. The controller then shuts down the generator and high power systems and stands by until the emergency switch is shut off, then resumes normal feed schedule. A log of emergency switch events is maintained on the system compact flash card as a record of unusual events and happenings.
2. A wakeup switch has been activated, that powers up the radio and allows the user to break into the program with a Control C, or to just watch the controller operate during normal sampling and feeding (this normally happens as the radio is powered to send diagnostic and status information to shore each hour.)
3. Check the time and at 55 minutes after the hour turn on the GPS receiver to allow it time to warm up (acquire the satellites and download the most recent almanac and to download the satellite ephemeras.) The data is acquired, integrated into the data storage and transmittal program during the standard hourly routine.
4. Check the time and at 59 minutes after the hour turn on the Weeder module power, the sensors and the 900 MHz spread spectrum telemetry radio. The system then stands by for 1 minute waiting for a Control C to interrupt the program and allow the user to return to the operating system to run test programs, or download new software or sampling programs.
5. Check the time to see if it is the hour, and if so to start the regular hourly sampling program. The operations performed each hour include:
   1. Reading in the sampling control file “TIMES.DAT” which tells at which hour special operations are to be done - such as feeding, or turning on the video system and for how are input.
   2. Checking the system status by reading the Persistor A/D with voltages of the controller battery and its internal temperature ­ the Weeder A/D which checks system batteries, and if the generator is running the AC voltages and currents being drawn ­ the Weeder Digital I/O which tells the status of the breakers and what power lines are activated ­ the Weeder relay modules status to show which relays have been turned on - and outputs the raw readings and normalized output to a disk file and to the radio for relay to shore and the control central.
   3. Reading the GPS position and time and sending it out the radio and saving it to compact flash with the other data.
6. The program also checks to see if the lights have been turned on in the feed buoy and regularly outputs a warning until they are turned off.
7. If the hour is specified as a feeding hour, the program then goes through additional routines to feed the fish. This is controlled by a “FEEDING.TXT” file that has the time of each activity and the sequence of relays to activate to feed the fish and can easily be altered to change the feeding program. The feeding operations does the following:
   1. Starts the generator. This involves throwing a relay on the generator’s control box and waiting for 1 minute. Then the status of the DIO lines is read, and the generator 240 volts must be present as an indicator of proper start. If not the system, shuts down the generator, waits and then tries to restart again. The system will do 10 tries to start the generator, and if unsuccessful, will write the information on the compact flash data storage, and send it out over the radio to the control central on shore where an alert can be given to service personnel that a problem has developed. The number of tries to start the generator is written to the compact flash log and sent out over the radio to monitor if the generator is getting harder to start, or is taking longer than expected to start. The feeding operation is then terminated.
   2. If the generator is successfully started, the system then activates the main relay providing power to the feed buoy. After this relay is closed, the DIO status is again read, and checked against the normal breaker settings, and an alert is sent out if any of the breakers are blown or tripped. If the critical feeding breakers are tripped, the feeding operation is shut down and an alert sent to the control central.
   3. If the breakers are all set, then the program reads the feeding control file which sets the time step that the sequence of operations will be controlled by, and the steps in the feeding process. It presently controls pumps 1 and 2 and the rotary air lock (feeder). There is programmed capability of controlling all the relays in the feed buoy to allow for future expansion.
   4. The feeding operation reads a four digit hex number, decodes it and turns on or off the relays controlling the feeding operation. The system reads the relay status, then changes only the associate bit leaving the others in the present position, and then the system reads back the status and ascertains that the relays are indeed set as desired.
   5. The DIO status is also read to if any breakers have tripped during the feeding operation, and if so to terminate the feeding operation
   6. The A/D is also read to see the voltages, generator oil pressure and temperature, teed and fuel level, current being drawn, etc as status for monitoring operations. All these feeding operations are sent to the radio as they are done, and relayed to shore for real-time monitoring of the feeding operation for the Control Central.
8. When the hourly operation is complete, the system powers down the GPS, the Weeder modules, waits for 1 minute for a Control C interrupt, then shuts off the radio and waits until the next programmed hour or an emergency or wakeup command. The program was thoroughly tested in the lab at WHOI before being sent to UNH for testing in the feed buoy. The test setup allowed many problems, logic errors, operational glitches and programming errors to be caught before the system was run in the buoy - starting the generator and running the pumps, etc. This process is nearly complete and the software is being transitioned to UNH, so that they have full documentation and ability to modify the software as required. Below, a typical output that will provide shore based monitoring of the feed buoy operation.

The next step in the system development is the Control Central shore side support to receive the hourly telemetered data (see above) and display it on a screen in a manner that will allow the shore based personnel to monitor the feed buoy status in real time, and watch the feeding process. This work will start as soon as the feed buoy has been fully deployed and feeding operations successfully accomplished.

C. Important Results or Findings

1. The conductors built into the compliant feed hose worked reliably. The stretchy hose was required in mooring applications and the performance of the hose and conductors during the last year shows that these hoses can successfully be equipped with electrical conductors, and these conductors will survive conditions in the open Gulf of Maine.
2. The internal solitary wave study showed that there are strong internal solitary wave currents at the site, with maximum velocities greater than 1 knot at the surface. There is a velocity shear in the water column with deeper waters moving the opposite direction and slower that the surface with zero velocity at about the depth of the pycnocline. These internal solitary waves are strongest in the late summer when strongest stratification exists, and nearly non-existent in the winter when the water column becomes well mixed and cannot support freely propagating internal oscillations. Fortunately, the fish cages (in their down positions) are located near the minimum in horizontal velocity, so the effects on the fish cages will be much less than if they were at the surface. Although, these are waves with oscillating movement, they are still low enough frequency (25 minute period) so that the fish cage and mooring will move to an equilibrium position (drag on the fish cage equaling mooring tension) before the wave has passed. Internal solitary waves can create significant currents at shallow and deep depths, are observed on most coasts of the world, there effects can be stronger than the tidal and wind driven currents (as was the case at the OOA site), and need to be considered in offshore aquaculture siting studies.
3. The mooring tensions indicate the difficulty in setting the anchors in the exact design position to spread the tension among the mooring lines equally. This is a bit of reality of such designs that should not be sensitive to the exact position of the components as a commercial operation can not always take the time and effort to precisely moor the fish cages and align the mooring grid properly. Thus, the mooring design will have to provide extra safety in the design to allow for these “realities.” In these tests, the mooring tensions are about what was predicted for the maximum with the evenly distributed grid and greater current and wave forcing without the cage without counter weight at the surface. All these are real possibilities, and a measure of the successful design is that during the past few years the mooring and cage have remained moored and intact.

D. Difficulties Encountered
1. Spread Spectrum Telemetry problems prevent the environmental mooring data from being served in real time on-line.

2. Noise in the small feed buoy monitoring system that makes the results returned not as useful as they should be. This didn’t surface until after buoy deployment at the start of this year because no time was allocated for full system integration testing before deployment. There is some noise in the 1-ton feed buoy analog voltage lines, and some effort will be spent testing plug in filters on the data lines, and rapid sampling and averaging in software as improving the system status data quality during the winter.

3. Increased work not anticipated or budgeted for this year, and the delay in funding without accompanying delay in software delivery schedule.

E. Anticipated Success in Meeting Project Objectives on Schedule
We have made major progress in (1) getting the feed buoy controller software developed and tested for the new 1-ton feed buoy, (2) addressing the telemetry issues raised by the past year’s feed buoy and environmental mooring deployments, (3) servicing and upgrading the environmental mooring. Continuing these tasks into next year we anticipate a successful year in carrying out the proposed efforts and addressing the issues discussed above.

F. Reports, manuscripts, and presentations resulting from the project
Fredriksson, D.W., M.R. Swift, J.D. Irish, I. Tsukrov and B. Celikkol, “Fish Cage and Mooring System Dynamics Using Physical and Numerical Models with Field Measurements,” Aqua. Eng., 27, 117-146, 2003a.

Fredriksson, D.W., M.R. Swift, J.D. Irish and B. Celikkol,. “The Heave Response of a Central Spar Fish Cage,” ASME Jour. of Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering, in press, 2003b.

Irish, J.D. and D.W. Fredriksson, “Compliant Mooring Technology to Separate Buoy Motion from In-Line Current Meter Observations,” Proc. 7th Current Measurements Technology Conf, 165-170, 13-15 March, 2003a.

Irish, J. D. and D.W. Fredriksson, “Telemetering Environmental Monitoring Buoy and Mooring,” Oceans’03, San Diego, Sept. 2003b.

Michel, A.P.M., K.L. Croff, K.W. McLetchie, and J.D. Irish, "A Remote Monitoring System for Open Ocean Aquaculture." IEEE Ocean Eng. Soc. Newsletter, XXXVIII(2), 11-19, 2003

Poster at RARGOM meeting, Aug 03. Irish, J.D., D.W. Fredriksson, J. Ahern, S. Boduch, “Telemetering Environmental Mooring as part of a UNH “Observatory”.

References Cited:
Irish, J.D., W. Paul, W.M. Ostrom, M. Chambers, D. Fredriksson, and M. Stommel, "Deployment of the Northern Fish Cage and Mooring, University of New Hampshire - Open Ocean Aquaculture Program Summer 2000," Woods Hole Oceanog. Inst., Tech. Rept. WHOI-2001-01, 57 pg, 2001a.

Irish, J.D., M. Carroll, R. Singer, A. Newhall, W. Paul, C. Johnson, W. Witzell and G. Rice, "Instrumentation for Open Ocean Aquaculture Monitoring," WHOI Tech. Rept. 2001-15, Oct, 2001b.

Irish, J.D., and W. Paul, “Monitoring of Offshore Aquaculture Systems, Phase I,” in CINEMar, Open Ocean Aquaculture Demonstration Project, Annual Progress Report, Calendar Year 2002, January, 2003.

II. Tasks and Activities for Next Reporting period

A. Tasks for the next reporting period

1. Further tests and detailed analysis of the observed feed hose tensions relative to tidal height and currents will be undertaken.
2. Deployment of the load cells in the new four-cage grid to measure the mooring tensions in relation to the wave and current forcing to validate the UNH FEA models.
3. Continued deployment and improvement of the environmental monitoring buoy with (1) new telemetry hardware and base station layout, (2) air temperature and PAR sensors, and (3) a test of the coil cord conductor assembly for telemetry of deeper sensor data.
4. Development of the Control Central in close collaboration with UNH personnel, in particular Stan Boduch, which will also involve the archiving and serving of data on the WW.
5. Continued analysis of the pervious environmental monitoring and mooring tension data with Dave Fredriksson, and the publication of the results.
6. Improvements to the telemetry link between the two feed buoys and environmental monitoring buoy and the Seacoast Science Center and possibly a relay station on White Island.
7. Developments in feed buoy mooring and feed cables with conductors will continue with evaluation of current systems and modeling of different options.
8. Advice on materials, ropes, compliant members, etc as required.

B. Brief work plan to accomplish tasks
Walter Paul will continue to work with Brett Fullerton, Glen Rice and the UNH crew on the feed buoy mooring, feed hose with conductors and mooring issues. Jim Irish will continue to work with Stan Boduch on the feed buoy controllers, and telemetery issues. He will also work with Stan Boduch, Michael Chambers, and the UNH crew on setting up the base station and GUI for monitoring offshore operations at the Control Central. Jim Irish will continue to work with Dave Fredriksson on analysis of prior observations and work with Dave and Glen Rice on instrumenting the new mooring system with load cells and recorders and working on these results.

C. Anticipated concerns or difficulties
Reliable communications with the fish cages and environmental monitoring mooring are important as the program transitions into an operational mode where monitoring activites at the site from shore becomes more important. Therefore, improvements are being made in the radios and base station, and testing procedures are being established to assure optimum performance. If we can not make the link from the OOA site to shore more reliable, we will establish a base relay station with high gain antennas on White Island which is only a mile from the OOA site and should increase telemetery reliability at a penalty in slightly slower communications and more complexity due to the remote site on White Island. However, this is a reasonable approach that has no major design or hardware obstacle in establishing the site.

III. Expenditures
The program tasks and goals changed during the past year from what was initially proposed as the program work and priorities changed. The funds provided were inadequate to cover all the desired tasks, but the important tasks were accomplished in a reasonable time for the funded amount.