Day3/Week3

Scott, Gordon and I set out on a quest to conquer the ocean.And by conquer I mean find some freshwater seeps. I slept in a bit and slowly gathered my belongings after most people had already left to go out to the field. I worked with some of the TAs and made sure that out conductivity probes and GPS devices were synced up and ready to go. Little did we know that they weren’t perfectly synced and that it would take five hours to get our data to the working point that we wanted.

After loading up the gear including two kayaks in the back of a single minivan, I hopped in the side and held on to make sure that nothing fell out. Playing music and feeling the morning Hawaiian breeze was a good start to the day. I sat with the gear for a bit while one of the TAs ran back to get some more gear situated. Finally at noon we set out on the water. I had never been ocean kayaking before, and for the most part it was a lot of fun except for the fact that we had to be pretty conscious about the large amounts of electrical gear on board. The plan was to make several passes along the mouth of the valley and match up the GPS time stamps with the conductivity probe time stamps.

6 miles. Four flips. Lots of reef. Not enough sunscreen. Sore back. Fun.

We were able to vary our distances from shore so that we could get a large range of data. The fact that we had two kayaks with monitoring setups also helped so that we could compare data. Later on we made some graphs out of our data. While there were some oddities and incongruities, we found a couple locations of interest. Next step, match up the GPS data with the conductivity data to get a better spatial understanding of the results. Out on to the water again!