The Sun is Finally Back!!!!!!!!!

These are pics from Noel, they just show what happens when you leave your boats in the water.

Both the Seafox and Cassiopea broke loose and ended up on the dock by the girls wing. The Cassiopea is under the Seafox here, the pic was taken at night 'cuz it happened at like 8.


This is what John's boat, the Cassiopea looked like after they got the Seafox off of it, John was very upset.


This is the Seafox once they got it out of the water. You can see the holes in the side and the twisted metal on the front of it.

This was the 19. It's mooring line broke from the dock and it ended up getting flipped upside down and getting wedged under the seawall. The steering column and motor both got broken off. We recovered the steering column, but the engine is long gone.

Hey everyone,

The past few days have been pretty busy. We have had classes and projects since Thursday. We have an economic footprint project, ecotourism project to do for our environmental policy class, an aquaculture project to do for resource management, a data collection project for marine resources, a culture reflection, and literature reports all due next Friday. Luckily, today they agreed to push the culture reflection and lit reports back to be due the following Monday.

Thursday afternoon we had directed research time. For our group, we built a beam trawl which we will use to collect fish and invertebrates (don't worry, we'll release them again). To build a beam trawl, we had to bend a metal rod into a 1 m section with 1/2 meter sides. Then we used a table saw and a jigsaw to cut curved pieces of wood so the whole thing will slide easily in the water. We attached the rod to the two wood pieces and once we find a net, we will attach that to the rod so when it's dragged in the water, it will catch all of the organisms that are around. There will also be a chain between the pieces of wood that will actually be the thing dragging along the ground.

This is what a beam trawl looks like, my description wasn't very good.


Yesterday we just had class and then worked on our aquaculture project. Today me, Nick, and Erica visited a processing plant to interview the owner, Jim Baker. He turned out to be really nice and knowledgeable. His office was pretty impressive; he had a leather couch, a big screen tv, 2 computers, a mahogany desk, and a GIANT turtle shell.

For site clean up today, I was on dock duty. Because of the storm, all of our boats are out of the water being repaired so we had to scrub all of them down on the driveway. Some people in our group were in charge of cleaning up the rocks that resulted from the sea wall crumbling. Other people were in charge of moving rocks that are in the water away from our pier area. While we were cleaning the boat, we find a tiny fish living in some of the water pooled up in the back of it. Don't worry, we saved the fish. After site clean up was over, we all (all 27 of us) jumped in the water. Yesterday was the first day we were allowed back in the water so we were all quite happy. We were all going through sea bath withdrawl.

When I woke up this morning, I had a ton of bug bites all over my legs so I think there are bugs in my bed. Don't worry though, I stripped my sheets, shook them out and put bug spray all over my mattress pad. I heard that febreeze kills bugs too so I sprayed some of that as well. It better work 'cuz I don't like the idea of things crawling on me at night. Speaking of which, I found a giant cockroach in my pants the other day (don't ask me how it got there, I'm just as confused as you are). Needless to say I panicked, but all of my roommates were sleeping so I couldn't scream. I handled my nightmare on my own in silence. That roach, however, has now taken up residence in our bathroom so I try to spend as little time in there as possible at night since that's when he decides to come out.

Today for community outreach I am on arts and crafts with the kids. I'm pretty excited because we are painting the leftover coconuts and I absolutely loved that when we did it before. We were supposed to go camping tonight but because of the storm, we are just having a cookout here. Everyone was pretty happy about since we have so much work to do. Well, that's about it for now, I hope you all are doing well.

-Michelle