Almost up to date. Vive le MBQ!

Yesterday morning was spent breaking down Ranjan's growth assay in Oponohu Bay that we had set up within the first couple days of the class project process.  I was snorkeling so my job was to locate the bags of algae that were tied to substrate ahead of Ranjan who recorded the depth they were at and then a diver collected it.  This was to expedite the process because we had ~80 bags to find.  I saw a trumpetfish! They are so much bigger than I thought.  Other than that most of the fish and things to see are the same as Gump reef except more in number. Oponohu is largely covered with algae...it really is sad.  This took a couple hours.  I pulled my wet suit down to my hips in an effort to get a lil sun on my tummy and back.  Most of the time here we are fully covered because we are doing things for long periods of time in the water and would fry otherwise.  After collecting everything, we came back to the lab and started taking the algae out of the bags.  My job was to dry the algae in a salad spinner so that an accurate weight could be taken to determine growth.  After about my fifth go-around with the salad spinner, my huge girl-ceps managed to rip off the handle. Sweeeeeeeeeeet.  I felt so stupid.  However, Handyman Wilson was able to fix it while I continued the work with the second spinner.  After all the algae was weighed and recorded we were officially done for the day.  The draft of the project proposal was due the next day so that's literally what we did until 10:30pm.  I still don't think it was very complete.  So much work and so little time really.  I feel like ours was largely subpar after hearing about other groups but at the same time Peggy told us to make it concise and 15 pages is not concise so ours will probably be okay.   Our group has a lot of work ahead of us.

So today! All morning I have been playing catch up in my field notebook and on the blog while the rest of my group and another group work on sediment sorting.  However, only 3 people really work at a time so my business with something else was not detrimental.  The rest of today will be spent chilling, exploring, and then working on our proposal once we get the revisions back from Peggy...that should be interesting.  

The past couple days I have been kinda homesick and miss you all so much! Sending lots of love. I hope you are all healthy and happy :) Even though I may be homesick, I am having the greatest time and making the most of every moment.