Our team was bolstered by the addition of Aspen today as Dr. A needed to help the robotics team move around/operate units.  The ciguatera team were kind enough to take us to our first lagoon survey location.  Today we surveyed lagoon sites arrayed around the innermost “v” of the island where water quality tends to be poor/highly turbid.  These sites were all very shallow so they went quickly.  We completed our first set of transects in short time, waited for Dr. A for a bit and then ended up getting a ride from the ciguatera team again.  Again we finished up our lagoon transects quickly… and waited for Dr. A without seeing him.  The ciguatera team again came to our rescue and drove us to our third site.  Upon their heading off, we agreed to meet at a pier at 3:00pm (they said that they would wait for us if we weren’t there at that time).  This third site had extremely murky water so we opted to not survey it and instead started our walk to the pier.

This is where the day got interesting.  We walked for about 30 minutes, missing the turn that we needed to take to the pier.  When we looked at our map, we noticed a little road that ran out quite close to the pier.  We decided to do our third and final survey for the day right then given the pier seemed so close. Again the water was shallow so it was completed quickly.  The pier was actually farther  from where we were then we though and so we didn’t get there until nearly 4:00pm.  We thought our drivers would miss the turn so we went to the main road where we waited for a total of 3 whole minutes for our ride to get us. However it wasn’t the ciguatera team it was Steve. That was when we heard that our original drivers got to our rally point at 3:00pm and waited there until 3:45pm. In the end it all worked out and we all got back safely.

Over all it was an adventures day.  A day where we got a good amount of data and all had a good time.

-Lagoon team

Hayden, Meg, Julie and Aspen