Beginning of Week 7
Where does one begin? My days are starting to blend together, so I will just share some of my favorite moments from these past few weeks. Well, we safely returned to Friday Harbor yesterday to provision the boat, shower, and get ready to go out to sea again for two weeks. Being on land, freshly showered, in dry clean clothes may sound quite ordinary, but yesterday I was enjoying all those things and more. The Gato Verde has been our home for about three weeks, taking us to places around the San Juans in search for whales. The weather has been heavenly and for the last nine days Colleen and I have been commenting on the fact that “October is the BEST month of the year!” Our birthdays are only two days apart so it has been fun enjoying every sunset, gawking at the Harvest moon, and noticing all the colors of fall. We are planning a Bowling Night to celebrate our birthdays and I can’t wait to show off my moves. Ha Ha! I do have to admit that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed getting to know all of the students, instructors, and captains over this whole experience. We belly laugh at least a hundred times a day and for some reason I get the giggles sometime between 1 and 2 DAILY. It’s often a restless, stir crazy kind of madness that often catches me by surprise. Smile! We have all enjoyed mooring in different locations around the San Juans, but Stuart has to be one of my favorites so far. Colleen, Erin and I explored and got some major energy out there. We ran some stairs, scrambled up a steep hill, and like clockwork we had lotttts and lottttts of laughs. We have only had one whale encounter this week and it was with J’s and part of L’s off the west side of San Juan Island. We collected lotttts and lotttts of data which I still need to spend more time analyzing in the upcoming week. I was able to use my PDA to collect data, which felt great being my first time entering the data right into the palm pilot. I felt like it was a more accurate representation of where the whales were and kept a time stamp for every entry which was a little piece of heaven. When I was using my data sheets in the first two weeks, I felt very distracted and honestly not the most efficient. Using the PDA allowed me to stay focused by prompting me of what to collect. I’m excited to use it again this week; Dr. James Ha from the University of Washington wrote the software for the palm and was out again with us on Friday. Well, I realize that I haven’t shared my Dall’s porpoise bow riding stories, yogas every morning on the bow, or about being mugged by porpoise when we were just floating. But I can’t wait to tell you in person…hopefully soon. I need to do a few more things and then we are off again.
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