Meet the Waterfront Staff

by Megan Dethier

Perhaps the two most important things for a high-functioning marine lab are an excellent seawater system and some kind of boat fleet.  As any boat owner knows, boats (and places to keep them) are a handful – FHL has a small but mighty waterfront team who look after this very important facet of our operations.  This essay celebrates that team, adding to previous essays about our Maintenance and Custodial teams (Aug. 2022), Dining Hall staff (Aug. 2023), and Front Office staff (Feb. 2025).  Future Tide Bites will introduce you to other FHL team members, including fiscal and student-oriented staff.

Our current waterfront staff consists of three skilled workers with diverse backgrounds and talents.

Pema Kitaeff has been associated with FHL the longest, starting in 2002 when she worked at the Port Townsend Marine Science Center and was also a volunteer diver at FHL, helping out with subtidal projects.  In 2004-5 she spent more time here, working as a diver and research technician for several graduate students.  In 2005 she applied to be the FHL Dive Safety Officer (DSO) and started that job while still finishing her MS degree in Marine Science at Western Washington University.  She took over the DSO job from David Duggins so that he had more time to spend running the R/V Centennial, and Pema also worked as a deckhand on that boat.  When FHL joined the College of the Environment in 2011, oversight of the DSO position was moved to campus Environmental Health and Safety – so Pema is based at FHL but technically employed by EH&S.  She now runs the busy FHL dive program – advising on all local dive plans, managing the paperwork and fees, checking out new divers, operating the air compressor, helping out with boats, keeping an eye on the weather, and serving as a dive buddy and boat tender as needed.  She manages to carve out time to help teach the FHL Subtidal Ecology course every 2 years, and in the portion of her time not covered by her DSO position, she works as a tech in the Seastar Lab.

Pema’s favorite parts of her job are the view out the window of her office on the pier to the always-changing harbor, working on issues with FHL’s wonderful Maintenance crew, and diving under the dock where there is a surprising amount of diverse marine life.  There is also a lot of gear lost under the dock, so she keeps a close watch on new divers as they practice removing their gear underwater; equipment that gets dropped into the mud tends to get swallowed up, although as a graduate student, Olivia Graham dropped her mask there but found it 1.5 years later!  Pema’s least favorite part of her job is having students and researchers ignore warnings about the importance of planning waterfront activities around the tides and weather, which are very crucial here.

Kristy Kull is another long-time FHL employee whose job has evolved with time.  She was a student in the ZooBot program in Spring 2007 and returned as an apprentice in the Pelagic Ecosystem Function (PEF) program in Fall 2008 after graduating from Cal State Long Beach.  Then she “stuck” at FHL, like so many have!  For about 3 years she worked as an hourly employee — sanding rust off the Centennial and serving as a deckhand, doing beach seines, and many other wet and messy jobs.  Then she was able to join the permanent staff with a complex job description involving not only these wet jobs but skippering Centennial, managing billing for boat time and moorage contracts, and using her artistic eye to assemble FHL publications, including Tide Bites and our annual printed newsletter, Intertidal Tidings.  She is also in charge of care and “feeding” of the FHL Ocean Observatory instruments in the water under the dock, and the scientific equipment on the boats such as the CTD.  She has amassed an impressive knowledge base of this specialized equipment as well as being an excellent boat driver.

Kristy’s favorite part of the job is being out on R/V Kittiwake, where every day is different in terms of the students she interacts with, the catch sample that comes up from the bottom, and the birds and mammals that they see.  She tells a story of the day that someone opened a shed on the end of the pier which houses large equipment, and found a CPR dummy sitting there in a chair which was very startling to encounter!

Eric Loss is the “new guy” on the waterfront team but has made himself indispensable since starting his job as Marine Operations Manager in 2022.  Eric earned his undergraduate degree at Bowdoin College and then had a series of boat-y jobs including working on a tall ship for SEA|MESTER and operating large sailing ships for eco-tours.  He moved to San Juan Island with his family during COVID and worked at Ferry Boat Seeds farm until he joined FHL as our half-time Marine Ops guy.  Eric also spends part of his time working on our Maintenance crew.  He still runs his own Beaverton Garden Farm and brings wonderful veggies to FHL staff in season.  He has tremendous skills running and maintaining boats, interacting with students, keeping an eye on boat budgets, and thinking about how to make our waterfront operation safe and efficient.  He has also trained several relief captains on the complexities of operating the Kittiwake so that there is always a boat operator available when needed.  His favorite part of the job is working with the PEF apprentices, getting to know them during a quarter and watching their boating and research skills improve.  His least favorite is dealing with the messes left by river otters on the dock, boat decks, and gear; the waterfront team refer to these animals as “poop weasels” and don’t consider them cute at all.  Eric spends a lot of time with the pressure washer keeping the waterfront realm clean!

To help support our marine operations, a fund was created by Gordon and Helen Robilliard in 2010, which aids us in keeping our dock program functioning and allows us to replace needed equipment that wears quickly in our salt-water environment.  The ability to purchase items with gifts from donors allows us to keep hourly use rates lower for our boats, so that the fleet can remain accessible to researchers, grad students and our classes.  If the holiday spirit moves you, please consider a gift to the indispensable Gordon and Helen Robilliard Marine Field Equipment Operating Fund.

FHL Holiday Wish List
Small fuel tank: $90
6 lifejackets: $318
8 pairs of oars: $512
Life rings for floating breakwater: $822
Automatic Identification System (AIS) for Auklet: $1,200
New trailer for Auklet: $11,000
In-hull mount for Kittiwake fishery sonars: $15,000
New outboard motor for Auklet: $17,000
New dock crane: $80,000
New research vessel: $4 million

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