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SIUSLAW
Sports News:
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The Siuslaw News
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Email: sports@thesiuslawnews.com
FEBRUARY
28
•
2015
Good cheer
A Sporting
V iew
By Mark Vasto
The greatest
fight held
that day
Will all the hand-wring-
ing and wrangling lead to a
Ringling Brothers-worthy
spectacle? Can a “should
have happened five years
ago” championship fight
between Floyd Mayweather
and Manny Pacquiao on
May 2 really be considered
“the fight of the century?”
Will this fight settle, once
and for all, if the undefeated
Mayweather is “TBE” (the
best ever)?
The answer to all of the
above is “no.”
At face value, we are
talking about two boxers
who undeniably are past
their primes. The day of the
fight, Mayweather will be
38 and Pacquiao will be 36.
There will be commentators
for the fight younger than
them. Both have lost a step.
Pacquiao has lost two
fights, once getting dumped
like a sack of rice — a shot
so vicious that everyone,
including this writer, had to
worry about his health, and
still do.
Also at face value?
Ringside tickets at the
MGM Grand will be avail-
able only to gamblers with a
$250,000 line of credit that
they must put in play that
weekend. Floor seats will
See
VIEW 3B
On the
Bite
A weekly
fishing report for
the local region
www.dfw.state.or.us/RR
MID COAST LAKES:
The rainbow trout stock-
ing program began in many
mid coast lakes in early
February. Be sure to check
out the 2015 stocking
schedule for the most up to
date information. Fishing
See
FISHING 3B
S p o r t s
C a l e n d a r
Spring sports
• March 17
SHS baseball
at Taft HS
3 p.m.
• March 19
SHS track
SHS Icebreaker
4 p.m.
• March 20
SHS softball
hosts Bandon
5 p.m.
Ned Hickson/Siuslaw News
Members of this year’s mostly freshman Viking cheerleading team perform at halftime during Siuslaw’s final game of the basketball season last week.
The squad placed eighth at the 4A state tournament on Feb. 14.
Something to
A
t 4:15 a.m. on Feb. 14, mem-
bers of Siuslaw’s cheerleading
squad weren’t home dreaming
about their Valentines.
While most of us were
B Y N ED
sleeping, all nine mem-
H ICKSON
bers of the mostly
Siuslaw News
freshmen Viking squad
were already loaded
onto a bus and heading to Portland to
compete in the OSAA’s 4A state cheer-
leading tournament.
CHEER about
After a 4-hour trip down the I-5 cor-
ridor before dawn, the group would
have a total of 2-1/2 minutes to
demonstrate the culmination of a sea-
son’s worth of preparation by execut-
ing a series of stunts, jumps, tumbles
and motion techniques honed along
the hardwood perimeter at basketball
games.
“You’re always thinking about the
chance to compete at state,” says long-
time Siuslaw coach Diane Conlee.
“Every practice, every game the team
is thinking about how to improve its
skills in order to earn the most points
at state.”
Before the team hits the mats to per-
form in front of judges, it gets a chance
to warm up in a series of rooms that
eventually leads to the main floor.
Because Siuslaw was one of the first
teams to be scheduled, there was little
time for nerves.
“We hardly had time to breath,”
Undersea glider can ‘think like a fish’
Conlee says. “It seemed like we got
there, took a deep breath — and then
we were on.”
After weeks of training and per-
forming, as well as competing in two
OSAA-sanctioned meets in order to
qualify for state, everything comes
down to 150 seconds.
“There’s no consolation round or
wrestleback,” says Conlee.
See
CHEER 3B
T IDE T ABLE
Entrance Siuslaw River
OSU project will help
identify oceanic hot
spots with help of robot
CORVALLIS — Oregon State
University researchers have received a
$1 million grant from the W.M. Keck
Foundation that will allow them to
outfit a pair of undersea gliders with
acoustical sensors to identify biologi-
cal “hot spots” in the coastal ocean.
They also hope to develop an
onboard computing system that will
program the gliders to perform differ-
ent functions depending on what they
encounter.
In other words, the scientists say,
they want to outfit a robotic undersea
glider to “think like a fish.”
“We spend all of this time on ships,
deploying instrumentation that basi-
cally is designed to see how ocean
biology aggregates around physical
features — like hake at the edge of the
continental shelf or salmon at
upwelling fronts,” said Jack Barth, a
professor in OSU’s College of Earth,
Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences and
a principal investigator on the project.
“But that just gives us a two-week
window into a particular area.
“We already have a basic under-
standing of the ecosystem,” Barth
added. “Now we want to get a better
handle of what kind of marine animals
are out there, how many there are,
where they are distributed, and how
they respond to phytoplankton
High Tide
Feb. 28
7:55am / 7.0
9:36pm / 5.9
Low Tide
1:56am / 3.3
3:02pm / 0.7
March 1
8:54am / 7.0 3:01am / 3.1
10:20pm / 6.1 3:52pm / 0.5
March 2
9:45am / 7.1 3:54am / 2.7
10:57pm / 6.4 4:34pm / 0.4
March 3
10:29am / 7.2 4:38am / 2.4
11:28pm / 6.6 5:10pm / 0.4
March 4
11:09am / 7.2 5:17am / 2.0
11:57pm / 6.8 5:43pm / 0.4
Tristan Peery/OSU
OSU’s fleet of undersea gliders will expand to 21 by the year 2012.
blooms, schools of baitfish or oceanic
features.
“It will benefit a variety of stake-
holders, from the fishing industry and
resource managers to the scientific
community.”
Barth is a physical oceanographer
who knows the physical processes of
the coastal ocean. He’ll work with
Kelly Benoit-Bird, a marine ecologist,
who specializes in the relationships
among marine organisms from tiny
plankton to large whales.
Her work utilizes acoustics to iden-
tify and track animals below the ocean
surface — and it is these sensors that
will open up a new world of research
aboard the gliders.
“Our first goals are to understand
the dynamics of the Pacific Northwest
upwelling system, find the biological
hotspots, and then see how long they
last,” Benoit-Bird said. “Then we’d
like to learn what we can about the
distribution of prey and predators —
and the relationship of both to oceanic
conditions.”
Using robot-mounted acoustic sen-
sors, the OSU researchers will be able
to identify different kinds of marine
See
GLIDER 3B
March 5
11:46am / 7.2 5:53am / 1.7
6:13pm / 0.5
March 6
12:25am / 7.0 6:28am / 1.4
12:22pm / 7.1 6:43pm / 0.7
S
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