Field work

Today was the first day of real field work. Ahh!! The highs!!! The lows!! Anyways, I will articulate all that happened.

Well to begin with, I had no idea all the things you have to think about when you are conducting research. It is not just going out in a boat, jumping in the water, and doing stuff. We actually spent part of the morning at a hardware store looking for specific wrenches. We weren't even sure what size was right, because all the measurements were in the metric system. Why on earth would we need wrenches? More on that later.

Anyways, after that was lunch then field work! We spent a fair amount of time getting ready because Jada was training me and showing me everything we had to do to get ready including how to get the boat free from the dock and everything. Like I said, lots of things to think about. After loading up everything we were ready to go!

Our sites are about twenty minutes away from the center, so we had a fair boat ride. On the way there, there were a good amount of waves, and the boat ride was choppy. As you are going over the water, the water is aquamarine colored, and you can see under the water big, round, brown spots. These are the corals.

Jada has been doing this for a while, so she knows where all of her reefs are located from the seat of the boat, even though there aren't any markers. It's pretty impressive. So our plan for the day was to loosen nuts that were holding the tiles onto the reef, hence, needing the wrenches. Not exactly what you expected research being, huh? At least I didn't.

The first reef went ok, I got the good wrench (it turns out the wrenches we ended up buying were too big. It appears that it would be helpful if I had some handyman skills, but, alas, that is not the case). The second reef was where the trouble started. I didn't have enough weight on, so I kept floating away while I was trying to loosen nuts. The bad thing about diving too, is that you have too much time to think. I started getting upset because I kept thinking, “I can't touch the tiles, I can't touch the coral, there are rock fish in the sand, I can't touch anything.” And it didn't help that my vest was too low on my tank, and my head kept hitting my tank. In other words, there were a lot of troubles.

I came up from the first dive feeling fairly frustrated and upset. Jada made me feel better, though, and we made some adjustments so the second dive of the day would go better. I ended up wearing almost 18 pounds of weight. In salt water, most people wear about 8-10 pounds. So this was fairly ridiculous. Apparently, women have more fat than men, which makes them more buoyant. So I am just made of fat. Nice to know.

The second dive went much better, I stayed on the bottom, and was able to unscrew nuts fairly quickly. So at the end of the day, I was feeling pretty good.

I can tell you, one nice thing about field research is that you come back at the end of the day, and don't feel guilty about not going to the gym, or going for that run. You've been doing physical labor all day. So I come back, and write long messages to you!

More later, love to all,
Emily