final week madness

jeez you’d think after going to a college with 10 week terms I’d be used to chugging along through the final crunch, but I guess not! the work’s definately cut out for us this week, but it will get done … … … … its the getting done part thats the toughie…

the last week on water was an interesting one- who knew that we’d almost wish the whales would give us a break some time so we could analyze some data, or at least in my case wish there were absolutely NO marine mammals around so I could do my light bulb experiments- its quite funny. In total we ended up having 11 days with the whales- not bad for having no days for our first two weeks. And the amount of click day is ENDLESS….I wonder how many clicks total were recorded – I bet like 50,000 at least- what an excellant sample size that could be! (haha, yes note the “could” be). I ended up getting my other desperately needed spreading loss data- because of a certain seal (I lets call him Pesky Pete) I couldn’t do my experiment in Salmon bank, but found some shallow and seal-free waters in Griffin Bay before we headed into FHL for our one last time…

 we didn’t get to sail too much our last week 🙁 but I did get a few chances to sail the Cyprid, which I quite enjoyed, except the wind liked to die-off in rapid bursts and then gust for a few moments while I was in there. My hand-made anemone turned out pretty cool, in a very un-planned way which made it look like a realistic anemone at low tide (the big squishy ones)- I hope the Beach watchers like it (and i also hope it doesn’t get stuck to anything, it’s basically made out of glue), the tentacles actually come in and out!

besides the data collection (and awesome photos of breaches, tail slaps, J1, and yes MORE dork) we had nights of flight of the conchords, excellent food, analyzing data, analyzing problems in our analyzing programs, re-analyzing data after figuring out what we did wrong in our analyzer programs, and cliff diving- and we made it out alive! I also flew Val’s kite again off the Gato Verde, which also almost got lost at sea and it’s tail stuck in the prop, but was rescued (our man-over board drills have been really handy) and got to flying again for one last hurrah! I must say it was sad after our last day, even though we were exhausted after it all and cleaning the whole boat- no more whales or towing arrays for a while 🙁

 and now I am back to work!

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