We mapped Mission Lake yesterday (April 4), a cold, cold, day in Kansas for April. Tempterature in Horton, Kansas, was 25 degrees, with a windchill of 13 degrees when we left the Survey in Lawrence that morning. It was even worse out in a boat in the lake, with the wind blowing and the occasional blast of spray from the transducer mount.
However, science must be served. We spent about 5 hours out there, collecting somewhere upwards of 40,000 depth pings of raw data using our Biosonics 200-kHz and 38-kHz transducers. In the really shallow areas, where there was a danger of grounding out the transducer, we raised it up and did some manual probing with a measuring rod, logging the position using the echosounder GPS and ArcGIS software and manually entering the depths as called out. Another hour to collect some 200 points by hand in a small area. Yeah, the Biosonics system is the way to go.
Here's a pic of our survey tracks around the lake.
