TEAM

Nothing could have prepared me for the beast of a week I just finished. And to be honest, I am still finding it hard to believe that I survived the ordeal. But I found it very rewarding to push myself to the limits. I was pleasantly surprised to see how far I could go.

Day 1: Roadtrip to a new destination…..Morris Landing. Continuing my tour of the east coast, we left the lab around 11am and drove an hour and a half south to the Topsail beach area. There is a Natural Reserve that Rachel is now using for her research. After a car ride of studying GRE vocabulary, we drove to the end of the road that literally dumped right into the sound… welcome to Morris Landing. All that exists at this site is a boat ramp and a wooden pier (small). Picnic lunch complete with our famous watermelon snack. Work begins: Michael and I started seining. I took one step into the sound and sunk to my ankles…..hello mud. It was a joke….literally I laughed at how ridiculous it was. Every step meant sinking. Probably the worst nightmare for my knee…plant and twist. Finally we got the seine set and started walking. Hello wind. The wind inflated the net and tried to send it flying like a kite. So with strong wind, currents, and sinking mud, we started walking. Hello fish. Lots of fish. A new species….bay anchovies. Fun fact- they die pretty much instantly out of the water. The process was sooo slloowww. The wind meant I had to hand weigh everything. I sat on a bucket cramming fish into ziplock bags and hanging them on hand held scales. An hour and a half later we finished our first site….5 to go!!!! By 4 pm we were done with 2 sites and the tide was coming in really fast. (that was 3 hours later). Frustration set in as Rachel was clearly getting annoyed at how long we were taking. Michael and I kept our cool and pushed on. Eventually we ended up bagging all the shrimp to weigh/measure later. Finally at 7 we finished. A sloppy miracle. Very very tiring and mentally draining. We headed to Surf city to grab some dinner. Ended up at an Italian place and had some yummy pizza. Trust me, we ate as slow as possible to stall getting back to the Landing.

We set up tents next to a pile of oysters. It was a joke thinking we were going to sleep there but the tents were great for anti-mosquito protection. The bugs were terrible! So we huddled in the tent, eating hot tamales and playing catch phrase and cards to kill some time. The temperature in the tent reached upwards of 90 degrees. Finally at 1 am we got back to work pulling in the fyke nets. We set up a little camp station where Jane and I counted and measured fish. Yay for having actual chairs. But the lantern attracted some crazy insects. Michael and Rachel had a run in with two pairs of yellow eyes in the marsh (and some crazy sounds). We believe that they were a pair of foxes. Sort, measure, count, bag, weigh, repeat. 2 am ….. 2:30 am….3 am…..3:30 am done. Throw everything in the van. Start driving. Make the car 60 degrees to keep Rachel awake. Try not to fall asleep. In and out of conscious. 5 am back at the lab. Just want to get home.

6am shower, snack, bed time.

10am force myself to wake up

spend the day exerting minimal energy

amazing night of sleep

Day 3: pack up the truck. Roll out after lunch. Destination SOBX. (forgot our pastries in the lab….terrible). THe whole trip takes about 5-6 hours….sitting in the car, sitting in line, sitting on the ferry. A lot of sitting and waiting. And trying to stay as cool as possible. Heat indexes around 100. I finished re-reading the 7^th Harry Potter book as my entertainment. We had a nice dinner in Ocracoke before waiting out a long ferry line to Hatteras. Lots and lots of people in the OBX this weekend. Stocked up at the grocery and finally reached our lab house.

Day 4: I made everyone cinnamon roles for our pre-work breakfast. Then we went to the marina and met up with our boat guy – Jim. He is awesome!!! Jim hauls our equipment across the channel and tells us stories about fishing. The routine began. Well the seining was quick because we hardly caught anything! Literally ZERO fish in one of the nets. Otherwise it was pretty much just handfulls. The heat was definitely the worst this whole summer. I think that my experience at camp really has helped me learn how to cope with heat. I know it was hot. But I adjusted and really didn’t have a big problem with it. I just accept what its going to be like and try not to think about it. So my resilience to the heat made me maintain a good level of energy. You could definitely tell everyone was slowing down though. By noon especially. Unfortunately, the vegetation sampling was taking a while. We had to break for lunch because there was no way we could keep going. No shade. And the bugs were terrible because we lost the wind. MY escape was my Yummy PBJ. The problem now was that we had planned to be done. Hence I did not have my sunscreen. It reached the point where we could feel out skin burning. This resulted in very creative wraps. Rachel was walking around in a towel cape, I tied my rash guard across my shoulders and into my sunglasses to shade my nose. Still 6 more transects of vegetation to go. Hoorah! The water was boiling. Easily hot tub worthy. Everything was stagnant. Michael and I were counting plants. He climbed through some pretty crazy shrubs that could have easily poked out eyes. It was 2 pm now. We were all starting to daze…heat exhaustion and dehydration setting in. But somehow we finished.

AMAZING shower. Sat on the couch and didn’t move for like 2 hours. The interns drove down to Buxton and ate dinner at a Grille. I had ½ pound of boiled shrimp and veggies. Man it hit the spot. I love it when you have the perfect meal.

7:00pm. Time to break out the canoe and paddle ourselves back to our site. Set the fyke nets. And I ended up sitting inside one of the fyke nets haha.

9:00pm Bed

1:30 am awake. Already. Geeze. Canoe again. Still. MOSQUITOS. No wind.

It’s all really a blur now. But Thank goodness the process only took us a little over an hour. A miracle really because it has taken use upwards of 4 hours. But our catch numbers were low. It is a but discouraging to realize that all of the driving, unloading, set up, etc… involved for the Hatteras site only ends up in us catching a very small amount of fish. The same occurred last time. I know it’s part of the research…..but sometimes I question the rationality.

4 am bed…..can’t fall asleep. 6 am finally asleep. 7 am awake again

back to the site. Pack up all the gear. Pile it in the truck. Head to the ferry. The whole island decided to take the 9 am ferry. We spent over an hour sitting in the same spot in line. Finally on the ferry. The ferry almost got stuck on a sandbar. I can only imagine……..

12:30 ferry to Cedar Island. A very long 2 hours. Drive back to the lab.

5:00 pm Home.

Tired yet of reading this. I would be. It might seem like a downer but I really wanted to show the rigor of the job. This was a hard week. But I know that in a few months I will look back and laugh at how ridiculous it was but also how accomplished I feel. THe best thing about this week was that I feel like our lab got a lot closer. We have really reached the level of a team. We work well together and have a good time. We no longer talk just about work but about other more personal things. We play games, laugh a lot, make fun of each other, do ridiculous things, and share some pretty incredible memories. We each have our highs and lows. But in the end, I think we have bonded really well. Fun fact: I have been awake and working with the people in my lab at every hour of the day. 5 am to 4am. We have seen each other in a very raw and real environment. It doesn’t get much more true than that.

Only 4 more days left. Hard to believe it has been 8 weeks.