Sorry it's been so long

Hey,

Sorry it took me so long to write again. I have been BUSY!!! We started our directed research (DR) projects yesterday. As we were getting ready to go, our instructor, Catherine, informed us that her nickname with her old research group was "Slavedriver". Had she mentioned this when all of the projects were presented to us to pick, I would not have chosen to be with her. For the next 3 weeks we are supposed to leave at 8:30 in the morning and get back at 5:30 in the evening....we have to bring our lunches.

So yesterday since it was the first day, we didn't head out to Bell Sound until 9:30. It was a cold, overcast, windy day. We have to lay 100 m transect lines and do a 1 x 1 m quadrat every 10 m. Each transect has to be laid 200 m apart from the last one. Because we have no boat (John's DR group is using it) and no truck (only one is working right now), we have to swim and walk everywhere. The original plan was to do 10 transects in each of 12 areas (each area being about 5 square km). After yesterday, Catherine decided we may only get to 4. Anyways, so we were doing our transects and we were cold, and we kept getting waves in the face, and we kept losing things because we had to carry everything (2 quadrats, 2 tape measures, 3 buoys, slates, mask, fins, and snorkel) to each transect. I lost my snorkel, one girl lost her slate with all of her information on it, Kyle, our TA, lost the thermometer, and the other girl in my group lost our algae sample. All in all, yesterday was terrible and we were all regretting our project choice.

Today has been much better. We got dropped off on the other side of the Sound so we didn't have to swim (Christina and I attempted it yesterday, got about 1/2 way in a half hour and decided it wasn't worth it) to the other side of the Sound. The waves were much better on this side, and although it was raining when we started, but late morning it was bright sunshine. This afternoon we are going back out to do more transects, hopefully in the second area. Well, that's about it for now, have a happy Thanksgiving!!

Love,
Michelle