Our first marine buoy is launched

With the light fading and an autumn moon rising, we cast off from Bideford quay with our precious cargo. It was almost a year since we placed the order for our water quality buoy, and at last deployment day had finally arrived. The anticipation was palpable, but we were in safe hands with our trusty seadog, Patch, on board. We also had the skilled crew of Severn Seas Shipping to navigate our way through the tricky Torridge estuary, but I think Patch was the key element to ensure success.

A couple of days earlier, we had been joined quayside by David Goldsmith of Xylem to assemble the buoy and test the sensors. We had chosen the DB1750 buoy – standing at 4.5m tall and weighing in at 700kg – to keep our sensors safe in the testing conditions of Croyde Bay. With four solar panels charging two hefty batteries, there should be power aplenty for our three sensor arrays to send us data every 15 minutes. The MET sensor sits atop the buoy, and provides weather data such as wind speed, direction, and atmospheric pressure. In the two submerged tubes, an EXO 2 sonde provides physical-chemical data such as pH, conductivity, turbidity, and dissolved oxygen, and a Turner C-Fluor probe provides data on bacterial levels. Finally, a navigation light is fitted to warn ships to stay clear!

The Torridge estuary can be tricky to navigate, becoming very shallow at low tide. For this reason, we needed to deploy around high tide, and on this occasion, this meant a night time voyage. It certainly added to the drama, but also added some complexity, especially when the swell increased above the forecast level! This is where the expertise of the crew came into its own, and the value of utilising a specialist buoy deployment vessel such as the Mair proved its worth.

In spite of choppy seas, the buoy was deployed successfully and can now be seen floating proudly in Croyde Bay. Over the coming weeks, we will be verifying the data and preparing our new dashboard to make the data publicly available.

If you would like to help us with our monitoring of water quality in Croyde by testing on the beach, please drop us an email: biosphere-mailbox@devon.gov.uk

The Croyde Marine Buoy is supplied by Xylem Water Solutions & Water Technology | Xylem UK and funded by Environmental Space Living Lab - Satellite Applications Catapult. Deployment was by Marine, Demolition & Consultancy | Severn Sea Shipping Co Ltd | England.