Three Way News

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Tuesday, June 13, 2006

In the field again

Sorry 3WN posting has been a bit thin these last few weeks, Hammer has been swamped at work and I have not yet been able to convince Libby Mae to live blog the bar exam and her prep for the test. And I've been back in the field for some more dolphin research. (The last project was posted here.)

We had a great week last week, catching and getting blood samples etc. from 13 different dolphins, one more than we caught in all of last season's work. We even had one big (500 lb.) male that we had never caught before which is always nice since there are so few in the local population we have never sampled before. But of course ones we've never caught put up a much bigger fight than ones we've handled multiple times and I have a bruised up arm to prove it. The first couple of us to grab on got pulled under a few times and I never did find my sunglasses tho my hat floats so I at least got that back.

This week is a different story. We were off the water Monday and we're going to stay in Tuesday as well as we are getting hit by the year's first tropical storm. I was sitting at a local bait shop this morning having an early lunch and watching the rain out over the bay when I got a call from one of my friends at the marine lab telling me that we were also now under a hurricane watch. We had already pulled all our boats out of the water and now had plans to move inland if need be. I sounds unlikely that we will reach that point but we are getting lots of rain and with a full moon just yesterday we are having very high tides especially with the wind blowing a storm surge at the coast. There are already several roads around here that are under water and I saw a local dock that was about 3 inches underwater at high tide. Since most of this part of Florida is barely a foot or two above sea level this is never a good sign.

On the other hand, sharing a living space with folks from Argentina, Australia, China, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands means I've gotten to watch lots of World Cup. Man, the US played flat against Czech Republic. But that's another subject.