Sunday, July 28, 2013

Luc - Week Five


The more time I spend living here the more I realize that the concept of "Hatfield time" does exists. Watching week five fly by confirms this assumption. The week started with a bang as I accompanied my good friend/coworker Kristen Simmons on a sampling trip to Florence, Oregon. The hour journey south was beyond beautiful, once passing through the city of Waldport, highway 101 becomes epic! The entire stretch of road between Waldport and Florence represents what the Oregon coast looks like; empty coves,  looming headlands, and endless twists and turns. Although, upon reaching Florence not a single shellfish interview took place due to there not being a single crabber present on the docks. This surprised me because of a rather large population of fishermen residing in the area. 

A new experience this week was learning the art of “the pursuit” as my supervisor Justin Ainsworth calls it. Since at this point in my data collection I have a sufficient number of land based crabber interviews but hardly any boat based interviews, Tuesday and Wednesday I  primarily targeted crabbing boats. This involves a bit more skill than land surveys since you first must locate a boat actively crabbing and then intercept it right as it reaches the marina. Not as easy as it sounds! Since usually I may only get one boat interview in an hour where as in the same amount of time I could possibly get 10+ land crab interviews from the piers, it’s worth spending the energy in obtaining boat interviews because it makes for a more diverse composition of information. This makes my data more accurate and certainly more informative.

Towards the end of week five I had the opportunity to take a behind the scenes tour of the Oregon Coast Aquarium thanks to Ichung, the COSEE mentor. Seeing the ins and outs of the aquarium was such a treat! I will not soon forget seeing the shark exhibit from the rafters and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little scared of falling in. Yikes! 



-Me being a goof during the tour.


-A look inside the massive walk-in freezer on site at the Oregon Coast Aquarium.

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