Back to the grind
Well, I am back home in Gloucester, VA and back to the daily grind in the office. Mark, Noelle and Sarina are still in Florida working on the coral reef survey. Sarina heads back to Virginia on Thursday, while Mark and Noelle will continue to work away at the project for another week and a half.
While they indicated they were interested in continuing to submit blog entries, with just two of them left to do all of the work, I'm not sure how many they will actually be able to accomplish. Late word from Conch Reef this evening was that the day was kind of a bust, complete with jellyfish stings, one AUV collision, a broken conductivity/temperature sensor (together, they provide a salinity measurement) and about a cup of seawater infiltrating the robot. Hopefully Noelle or Mark can provide us with some additional information!
So while I have the chance, I want to thank all of you that logged on everyday to read our posts and tuned in for our two webinars last week. This was the first time we have done this style of outreach directly from the field and it seems that the response has been very positive to our pilot project. I will be posting a survey very soon, which will appear in the introduction text of the Conch Reef Expedition homepage. Please take a few minutes to fill it out and let us know how we did! If you would rather just drop me a line, you can email me at petrone@vims.edu.
Thanks again everyone and stay tuned for the next few weeks as Mark and Noelle finish up the Year1 portion of this project!