Week two was full on, with two back-to-back days of fisheries data collection, the first of our transect dives & whale data collection, and some ocean trash collection and transformation. This was added to by the delightful addition of an external sports fishing competition, a bit of the harsh side of fisheries, but the data is important and so every day we trundled down to gather pictures and data to log.
Our first weekend was a definite welcome after the intensity of our training week and we excelled at relaxing and enjoying our location with assisting teaching local women to swim, sea swimming, paddleboarding, watching humpback whales tail lobbing, walking & playing football on the beach, a relaxing pottery workshop with a local women’s cooperative of pottery throwers, celebrating Josko’s birthday and a quiz!!
We’ve had lots of fun doing the data collection; we were split into 2 groups, Barcelona with Libby, Ark and Mal and Chelsea with Joe and myself… no intended references to football, the names were an unexpected outcome of the quiz we did on Saturday evening! Fisheries was slightly less intense than the one we did on the training week, perhaps a result of the fishing comp or the weather, or both, and we enjoyed our time at each site in between data point recording with team bonding over shared dislikes, likes, books, travel destinations and most importantly food, along with some rock pooling, sea swimming, reading and snoozing!
The diving was exhilarating… each time I get on the rib ready to dive, I am completely transported to another place and here was no exception. Chico, our skipper, also managed to make us all feel like we were in a James Bond movie by zooming us back to the beach at the end of our dives! Our first transects to complete ourselves were slightly hindered by a bit of a swell in the underwater surges, which left us whizzing forward and backward along the transect line attempting hilariously to place our quadrats and get images to analyse afterwards… I mean, even the footage was enough to make you a little queasy!! Pumped up after our dives, we managed to persuade Ines to take us to the local shop to stock up on biscuits, chocolate, snacky bits, fruit and these amazing spiral shaped coconut breads – delicious emergency rations to get us through the seemingly endless, albeit, improving rapidly, data logging!
Data logging, in all intents and purposes, is usually a brainless drudgery of identifying fish, cryptic species and coral, measuring points on images and recording these in an excel. Team LTO have managed to upcycle this model into an afternoon fest of fun – don’t ask me how, but I think the snacks have helped… There is a sense of teamwork, healthy competition, encouragement & support and satisfaction each time an id is confirmed bolstered by teasing, life anecdotes, chocolate and maybe a little craziness setting in.
Ocean trash was a tale of two teams… With Barcelona totally owning it and Chelsea coming up short with anything that could go wrong going wrong… Gathering the rubbish from the beach was relatively easy, with a total of three bags easily gathered in an hour on both sides… Rather depressingly really when we all know how long it takes to decompose, even the best of us still use single use plastics from time to time… (mental note, must do better)… The sorting, data logging also easy and fairly simple to get done. Now when it comes to transforming rubbish, LTO have acquired this amazing little Sea Monkey Machine which takes your average thrown away plastic bottle cap, shreds it into little pieces, melts it down which you can then squeeze into moulds of different shapes which you can then make anything with: earrings, necklaces, keyrings…. Very cool piece of equipment. As I said, Barcelona smashed it and they are all now walking around with various cool earrings hanging from their ears. No such luck for Chelsea, as we struggled to bolt the mould tight, struggled even more to unbolt the mould after squeezing in the plastic and after finding a vice in which we could place the mould, we struggled then to untighten and tighten the vice… So after 20 minutes, managing to complete one hammerhead, one manta and one humpback mould, we decided enough was enough and we would get one with making the holes and tidying them up, making them into lovely trinkets… But alas, again, the heavens decided otherwise and we were doomed with a power cut, on again? no off again, on? no, no, just a teaser then off for the out. At least we know what the end result should look like, and we’re determined to enable our little marine creatures to shine very soon! Also providing solace from our bad luck with the plastic machine was the fact that morning we had seen a beautiful sunrise followed by a large pod of dolphins playing in the bay. Then to top it off upon sending the drone up to record the dolphins Mario managed to stumble across a whale shark, not a bad Friday morning!
So, we are waiting to hear some whale songs, keen to paddleboard next to the whales, ready for some fun at the schools, eager for more diving and, most importantly, extremely excited by the prospect of Mexican food, chocolate cake and a visit to Tofo this weekend for Arks birthday!
Can’t wait to see what happens in week 3. I mean, I can wait, but I’ll be doing it extremely impatiently!!
