Brett Hobson, an engineer with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, with one of the underwater drones that will be plying Lake Superior’s waters shooting sonar waves toward the surface to count fish.

A wind- and solar-powered drone is towed to its release point off Ashland’s shore Tuesday. Two of the remotely piloted drones will spend the next 30 days cruising Lake Superior and collecting data on the lake’s health and the fish beneath its surface. (Peter J. Wasson/Staff photo)

The black lines on this map show the paths that the drones will take around Lake Superior. (Peter J. Wasson/Staff photo)

A wind- and solar-powered drone is towed to its release point off Ashland’s shore Tuesday. Two of the remotely piloted drones will spend the next 30 days cruising Lake Superior and collecting data on the lake’s health and the fish beneath its surface. (Peter J. Wasson/Staff photo)

In the water, it looks like nothing so much as an oversized, blaze-orange kayak — but with a 20-foot composite sail towering over it.

That sail is packed with sensors and computers, and a sophisticated sonar device is stored in the hull. There’s no one sitting on deck paddling because the boat actually is a drone — a drone that could be key to assessing the health of Lake Superior and its fishes for years to come.

Two of the drones, piloted remotely from California, will spend the next 30 days tacking back and forth across the waters of Chequamegon Bay and other sections of lower Lake Superior, measuring everything about the water and the life beneath it. One has been sailing near the Apostle Islands since the weekend, and the other set sail from Ashland Tuesday morning.

Data collected from the drones will be combined with measurements collected from another sensor, this one a blaze-orange, autonomous torpedo that will cruise about 40 meters beneath the surface, to give scientists a never-before-seen assessment of the lake’s waters.

That assessment, in turn, will help shape everything from conservation efforts and fishing quotas to measures taken to address the effects of climate change on Lake Superior.

Though the U.S. Geological Survey, Great Lakes Fishery Commission and other federal agencies have been collecting reams of data on the lake for decades, drone technology allows scientists to see things they’ve never before recorded.

A large ship like the 107-foot USGS research vessel Kiyi harbored in Ashland, for example, routinely does sonar fish surveys of the lake. But it has drawbacks, USGS research fisheries biologist Pete Esselman said.

The ship’s very movement through the water likely affects fish behavior, he said. The noise of her engines and the pressure of her hull cutting through waves may drive fish away from sonar receivers, giving an inaccurate picture of fish populations.

And the Kiyi’s keel, where her sonar receivers are located, is 10 feet below the surface, so even under the best of conditions she can’t record what happens in the top 10 or 12 feet of water.

“We’ve always wondered about the uncertainty of some data or the missing data from the surface zone,” said Melissa Treml, a research manager with the Minnesota DNR. “There’s still a lot to learn.”

That’s where the drone and torpedo come in.

Matt Womble, director of ocean data with Saildrone, which manufactured the boats, said the drones are powered 100% by wind and sun. Wind drives their sails, and the sun powers the meteorological, environmental and sonar equipment aboard. So it doesn’t make the noise that a big, diesel-powered ship like the Kiyi makes and it can essentially sneak up on the fish it’s trying to spot and count.

The drones, painted bright orange so boaters can easily spot them and plastered with warnings to keep clear, will travel designated paths, mostly along shorelines from Houghton, Mich., to Grand Portage, Minn., at top speeds of about 3 mph.

Simultaneously, the torpedo developed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute will cruise beneath the water with its sonar aimed up toward the surface, counting all those fish that boats might miss.

Brett Hobson, an engineer who helped develop the 8-foot-long machine — he refuses to call it a torpedo, for perhaps obvious reasons — said it cost tens of millions of dollars to develop. It’s completely autonomous underwater, but will surface every two hours to send data to its headquarters and get instructions.

Brett Hobson, an engineer with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, with one of the underwater drones that will be plying Lake Superior’s waters shooting sonar waves toward the surface to count fish.

The information collected over the next 30 days, and there will be terabytes of it, will be analyzed by scientists who will study everything from where prey fish are most abundant and how big they are, to how they might respond to temperature, algae, pollution or other environmental factors and how commercial fish such as lake trout respond.

The raw numbers of fish, their size and species will give scientists their most accurate ever assessment of fish stocks, which can be used by policymakers to guide stocking efforts, set size limits for sport fisherman and quotas or season lengths for commercial boats that take advantage of the $7 billion fishery every year.

The black lines on this map show the paths that the drones will take around Lake Superior. (Peter J. Wasson/Staff photo)

“It’s frankly amazing, the amount of data we’re going to collect,” Esselman said. “Even with five or six research vessels operating, they can only sample a tiny portion of the water in a lake the size of Maine. This new technology will allow us to gather much more data, and much more precise data, than ever before.”

The torpedo that’s not a torpedo also could, in future studies, give scientists a glimpse of what Esselman called the “black box” of life under Lake Superior’s ice cover during winter.

“Under the ice will provide the best value,” Hobson said. “It can run all winter long down there.”

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