June 19th – Kayaking
June 20, 2013Today was the first day of data collection for the SGD/seeps. Thomas, Scott, and I took two kayaks across the water in front of the valley trying to paddle in straight lines across the water. With the help of Emily (the best TA ever), we got the Solinst Leveloggers attached to the bottom of the kayaks with zip ties and rope. The Leveloggers have a conductivity meter on them. We each took the cheapest GPS receiver we could find (Garmin eTrex ), in the off chance we lost them. We put them in Ziplock bags and hoped for the best. We made sure to sync up the Levelogger with the GPS so the time stamps would match up.
The waves were a bit choppy in one area. Both kayaks flipped at least twice. I unfortunately lost my sunscreen bottle and sunglasses. The eTrex in a Ziplock bag floats, luckily. After the first time capsizing I made sure to stow the GPS in a more secure place than my shirt pocket. I wish I brought my camera to get some pictures, but it isn’t waterproof!
I kayaked about 9km today. It doesn’t sound like too much, but kayaking in the choppy ocean made progress a bit slow. My arms are exhausted. I’m sure I’ll sleep soundly tonight after all that exercise…
We looked at the Levelogger data and there are two points of interest that we are going to revisit. The problem is that we can’t get to GPS data to show up correctly on ArcMap to see where those points are. I’ll try to fix that in the morning…
Chinaman’s Hat (not my picture ):