Falmouth: Boats, Dolphins, BBQ, and research

This is a long time belated post. I am sorry I have been so lax on my posting these past few weeks.

After Portugal and Spain George and I then spent a weekend at his Parents house and then a few more days in the glorious Hatfield. But then, it was time for me to head back to Southampton so that I could pack all my things and go to Falmouth. (June 26- July 9)


I did not take many pictures while in Falmouth, but I can rustle up some of my friends for the blog.
The purpose of Falmouth was a two week field course to study the chemical, physical and "biological" properties of the Fal Estuary. We did three boat trips, one offshore on Calista, One estuary on the platoon and Bill Conway, and a geophysical habitat mapping on the Grey Bear.
Group 10 Fal Website  I apologize in advance for the terrible mistakes the website is ridden with.

I am not going to go in to all the detail about what we did on each trip etc but I will say that the geophysical mapping day was my favorite. (I started spelling like an American again) That day we used a device called a side scan which worked almost like an echo sounder which relayed and image back to the boats computer and then printed the image out. Bed forms and cool rocks generally showed up. We later streamed a video in the water and we saw a variety of Sea Stars and a crab and lots of kelp.

At the end of all the boat and lab work we had endless numbers of pages of raw data which we then had to compile onto that dreadful website (which we had approximately 2 days to complete). After that we then had about 2 1/2 days to complete a 6 page (single spaced, A4) fully referenced report of our choosing based on the data we collected. Here is my paper, if you so wish to read what I can accomplish on zero sleep for 2 weeks and more specifically, 2 days.  (I hope that link works).

Anyway, the times that we were not working our little tushies off, we were going out and exploring Falmouth. We also had a 4th of July All "American" BBQ on the beach.

Anyway, that is pretty much it for Falmouth. It was an absolutely amazing experience, and I would do most of it all over again (the paper I could have done without). 

Sara