Marine Scientists visit Canadian partners

Phoebe and Nathan with the team at Metocean Telematics

Hello! I’m Phoebe, one of the latest people to join the RS Aqua team as a Marine Scientist, alongside my colleague Nathan. We joined the team in January and are currently undergoing a 12-week graduate training scheme, inclusive of many aspects of the company such as product training, technical report writing, marketing and even getting hands on in the workshop for servicing and calibration.

Last week, Nathan and I were fortunate enough to cross the North Atlantic and meet some of our partners located in Canada. We flew into Ottawa where we got the chance to explore the city – walking along the river, viewing the parliamentary buildings and sampling a BeaverTails world famous Canadian pastry!

On Monday and Tuesday, it was strictly back to business as we headed to RBR Ltd – a company who design and manufacture oceanographic instruments, namely loggers and sensors. Alongside other RBR representatives from Chile (SouthernTech) we were given a tour of RBR’s facilities in Kanata, training on all products including logger configuration and sensor technology, support and service, calibration and Ruskin software training. We had a great time with RBR, inclusive of great food and even better company, but were shortly whisked away on to a flight to Nova Scotia on Tuesday evening.

As we were staying in downtown Halifax, we had a short taxi ride over the water to the Centre for Ocean Ventures & Entrepreneurship (COVE), based in Dartmouth. Here we were given a tour of the facilities from Eduardo Vaz, senior business development manager at RBR Ltd, who also gave us some sales techniques and advice which will be utilized in the future. Our trip to COVE also enabled us to meet part of the Turbulent Research team, the manufacturers of our Orca and Porpoise Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) equipment.

After an excellent Wednesday evening spent with members of the Vemco team in Halifax, the following day was held at their site in Bedford. During which we were introduced to acoustic telemetry and how this can be used for fish tracking and fine scale positioning, given training and demonstrations of all the equipment and a facility tour – which I was thoroughly impressed with!

Phoebe and Nathan with Richard Vallee from Innovasea

Our last day in Canada consisted of an equipment overview with the Innovasea Real Time Aquaculture team, also based in Bedford. Innovasea have developed wireless underwater environmental sensors which communicate acoustically, mainly used in aquaculture farming applications. We then travelled back to Dartmouth to meet with MetOcean Telematics – but not before grabbing a quick Tim Hortons! At MetOcean we were introduced to their three main aspects: MetOcean Systems, MetOcean Telematics and Defence & Security. We were given product training on these aspects of the company, including Iridium Premium Satellite and LiNC software.

I think I can speak on behalf of Nathan and I in saying that we thoroughly enjoyed our time spent in Canada, a remarkable country with particularly accommodating partners. I returned to the UK with a brain rife with new information, fully equipped to get started in our new careers at RS Aqua.