Data collection

Hi everyone,

I'm sorry for the long radio silence. In this case 'no news' meant 'good news'. I've been pretty busy, especially with my research. Over the past 4 weeks I have been able to collect quite a bit of data. So I think I'll dedicate this weblog entry to telling a bit more about that...

On the Bank
The most important and significant part of the data collection I've done over the past weeks was finally going to the Saba Bank for a few days. In 5 days on the Bank I was able to collect video footage for 50 transects of 500 meters long. A regular day on the Bank starts the afternoon before. I check whether all my material is ready (batteries charged? SD-memory cards empty?) and sometimes put it on board already. Together with the captain of the boat I look at the weather forecast, especially at wave height, wave period and wind direction, since that determines how choppy or smooth the driving is going to be and which area of the Bank will be most easily accessible. Then I choose one of my previously randomly assigned 'day-locations' as the goal for the next day.

The next day we leave early, usually around 7am. When we get to our day-location after 1 to 2 hours of driving, Saba will usually have disappeared behind clouds and fog. That's when we turn on the lasers and cameras on my array and lower it over board. On the live-view camera I can see when the array is close to the sea floor and if I need to ease out more line or take in some. Once the image looks good I enter a waypoint in my GPS. Then the waiting starts: not much more can be done until we hoal the array back up, other than watching the live view image and writing down the end of the transect and the start of the next one. After 3 transect I pull the array up to the surface to change batteries and SD-cards, if necessary, and to put a little distance between 2 series of transects.

Between 4 and 6 pm we get back to the harbour, rinse all material with fresh water and put it away. Then I run up to the office to start what we call the 'charging station'. I hook up 2 GoPro cameras, the 'GoPro battery backpack', the battery for the live-view camera and those for the GPS and lasers to the power supply. Then I start emptying SD-cards onto my laptop and external harddrives. Tired, but with a lot of video-footage that can now be analysed, I end up in the one and only harbour-pub for a beer (or two).

Dive surveys
The second part of my research is a series of dive surveys to measure the sizes of the Queen conch shells. Up to now I have done 3 dive surveys, one for each month from March till May. This was pretty difficult the first two times. During the first one obviously everything was still new and I did not have a lot of dive experience yet. For the second one it was a hassle to get it organised because there were a lot of things going on at the office at that time. The last one though went really smooth and we only needed 4 dives to measure the 100 individuals that I need for each month. On the last dive we even had some bottom-time and air left to explore the nearby coral reef!! :-)

All in all, my data collection is going in the right direction. Hopefully I'll be able to keep this up, because I only have 3 weeks left here!!!

I'll try to post at least one more blog before I leave…
And I'll try to upload some more photos too over the next few days…
But for now: 'over & sluiten'... or like we say on the VHF-radio: 'standing by on channel 16'.


Love, Sanne

Ps. Hetty, Nico, Lotte and dad, thanks for your little messages! I love reading updates from people at home (even if 'home' is currently not the Netherlands but instead New Zealand, Boston or Krakow :-p)