Beam Reach

A recap of my first three weeks!

Alexandra Kougentakis 9/4/07

Already into my third week at Beam Reach and I haven’t blogged yet once! But I will try to make this a good long one to make up for all the lost time, and I’m going to do a recap of everything that has happened so far. Getting to Friday Harbor was quite an ordeal for me to begin with, since my flight from New York went to Phoenix where I had to transfer to Seattle, and then from there the long shuttle ride and ferry that pretty much everyone else got to experience too, in total a 17 hour trip for me. It was after I got here though that the real challenges began.
I lived by myself off campus for most of college so getting back into the dorms was a bit of an adjustment, but one that I made pretty easily, the facilities here are pretty well-outfitted, and especially because of how nice everyone in the Beam Reach group turned out to be. That really makes a huge difference in one’s living experience. It wasn’t long before I felt pretty much right at home.
Another thing that helped me with the transition were the instructors. Jason picked me, Elise, Kenna and Heather (my first roommate) up from the ferry, so I got to meet him first, and I was immediately put at ease because of how friendly and helpful he was. Val I got to meet the very next day, the first day of class. Well, really the first day was a trip to the lighthouse at Lime Kiln, which was really beautiful and interesting to see, but just before that Jason and Val did brief bios of themselves. I was admittedly intimidated when Val introduced himself as a former physics professor from Colorado College. Oh boy…physics? Evoking bad memories from 6 years ago in AP Physics…uh oh. Val was clearly nice and had a sense of sense of humor though, which always helps, so I decided not to give up hope yet.
As I’ve come to realize since that initial warning, physics and math figure a lot more highly into the program curriculum than I had originally thought. The acoustics lessons a few days later made that quite evident, and just this past Sunday we had a light primer on statistics (bad memories of AP Statistics), but more on that later. I guess from the readings that we’ve had so far, especially the conservation plan, I was under the impressions that this was more biology-environmental science-policy than it actually is. My reflexive fears in physics and math sometimes make me really nervous that I might not be able to live up to the program demands. But Val has been really supportive to everyone on specific questions like that, so as I further develop my research proposal and figure out just what concepts I’ll need to be clear on, I know he’ll be able to help me with that (I’m lucky that he’s a very patient person). And my current roommate and boat bunkmate Sam, who’s really good in my areas of weakness, has promised to help me out too which is a huge source of relief for me. So hopefully things won’t be as distressing as they currently seem.
On that note, (having just mentioned the boat) I’ll switch gears to talk about that now, and I’m going to be 100% honest about it. The week on the boat (as part of the VaTo team, I got to be one of the first students) was terribly exciting. And by that I mean terrible in some ways and exciting in others. Well…terrible really only in one way, and that is a thing that is specific to me that didn’t really seem to bother anyone else. I’m really really REALLY sensisitive to the cold, and in spite of the many layers I’d usually pile on, I was often still uncomfortable, except during the periods when I’d be sitting right in a patch of blazing sunshine. We were SO lucky with weather, almost every single day was relatively warm and sunny. This week has been pretty cloudy and yucky-looking, so on the one hand I’m relieved to not be out on the water dealing with it, on the other I feel bad for the students in the JaMi team who have no choice. There was only one really bad day, the one windy one where we got a lot of good sailing done. While I can appreciate the “good things” that came of that (learning to sail, getting to see orcas, etc.), between the cold and the rockiness of the boat (and I was also a little sick at the start of the week), I was sort of a wreck. Todd was really great with advice about how to get over my sea sickness, he let me steer the boat for a while and that helped a lot. It’s kind of unfortunate that I’m not a fan of ginger but I managed to force down some ginger snaps and ginger ale and that helped a little bit. It was sort of a dilemma for me though, outside and cold and less sick, or inside and warmer and more sick?
What upset me the most about my problem with the cold was that it prevented me from being able to fully appreciate all of the really exciting things that happened that week. We actually got to see orcas REALLY close on just our second day out! And we saw them pretty much every day after that and got great recordings on the hydrophone. We also saw a lot of other sea life, and Todd was teaching everyone the ropes of how to sail, from handling the anchor to the pumping dock to raising and lowering the sails, etc. But a lot of the time I would get so distracted by the cold that all I could think about was when I’d get to run inside. I think that Todd was getting really annoyed with me at certain points. And during group discussions when we talked about what we observed with the whales and what we thought of the recordings, I usually didn’t have much to say, which was especially unsettling for me because I’m used to participating in class discussions a lot.
My group got back to land on Sunday, and I have to say I’ve never loved being back on non-moving earth quite so much. Yesterday we went to Lacrover farm, a super-land oriented experience that I totally fell in love with and I knew right away I’d love to do my service project there. But the best part for me was during class discussion right before the farm trip, when I was actually able to participate and speak like an intelligent, articulate human being again! And then reading the journal article for journal club and working on other assignments afterward…everything just feels so natural and right again, whereas during the week on the boat I felt like I didn’t really know who I was anymore. I really believe that next week, and for the other two weeks that we will be on the boat, it’ll be easier for me because I’ll be more used to it, I’ll definitely bring warmer clothing, and it will help a lot to have a firmer focus on my research. I’m hoping for sunny days like we had last week but realistically I know it will get cooler and the weather will not be great every day. I’ve never lived on a boat before, didn’t have a clue about sailing before last week, my physics and math skills are not all they could be, and the cold…well, I will just always be cold and that’s the way it is. So I feel like I’m a bit behind in the learning curve in a lot of ways, but after all, I didn’t come out here for an easy 10 weeks. I was looking for a challenge…I’ve definitely found it. Now I just hope I’ll be able to succeed in facing it. More updates on that in the weeks to come…