Busy Week

Things were pretty busy this week, with plenty of field work. On Monday we ran out to the instument platform in the Neuse River estuary to maintain some of the instruments. I hate the Neuse. It stinks. It's full of pig shit.

Pigs and tobacco are the two main agricultural products of eastern North Carolina, and while I'm not sure which is worse for your health, I do know which smells worse when you drive by. When hurricanes flooded the region in '99 there were pig carcasses floating in streams of pig shit running thoughout the towns.

On Tuesday Tony and I went out to the Lookout Shoals buoy, which is about 27 miles offshore. He's trying to get radio communications going for the current and wave data it's supposed to be sending back, but still isn't, and I was along as a second set of hands. It was a very calm day and the water was really beautiful -- crystal clear.

So we're out there in the middle of nowhere with no land in sight on only one or two boats as specks on the horizon and all of a sudden, with no warning at all out of the clear blue skies KA-BOOM!!!! It was a defeaning sound like a lightning strike very close, but there was no flash of light. I was on deck and Tony came running out of the cabin yelling WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT? I looked up, since there was no place else to look, and saw the faint vapor trail of a jet at very high altitude. The aircraft itself was too high to see. Apparently it was a sonic boom, from one of the Marine Corps jets from the air station nearby. About a minute later there was a double BOOM-BOOM, and this time we could see no plane, but they were up there because occasionally another thread-thin vapor trail would show up on a weird looping trajectory. I guess they were practicing dogfighting.

Wednesday I worked in the lab, but Thursday we were back at the buoy running some tests for unexpected problems we found on Tuesday. This time we took along snorkle gear to look at the fish schooling under the buoy. Visibility was 50-60 feet. We should have taken fishing gear, since there were several dolphin (the fish type) feeding on the little fish!

Friday I had to make a quick run to Chapel Hill and back for a doctor's appointment. Everything checked out OK.

I've just about decided to go ahead and buy a sailboat and live on it rather than waiting and renting a place for a year. Currently the model I'm most interested in is a Southern Cross 31, which is not too expensive (used), very cool-looking, roomy enough to live in, and a very capable blue-water boat as well.

Portuguese Man of War

Portuguese Man of War
Originally uploaded by Mark Ciccarello.

Here's another Man o' War I found this evening. But I only saw one, and on a much longer walk (~5 miles) than last night.

Man o' Wars

On a short (2 mile round trip) beach walk this evening I found 3 freshly washed up portuguese man o' wars. They're apparently not uncommon around here during prevailing onshore winds, but three is two more than I've seen on any one walk previously. Add the one I saw on my run yesterday, and I'm not sure I'd want to be in the water right now.

They're very cool-looking animals (colonies of animals, actually), and about as alien a life form as anything I can imagine, but I don't want to meet up with one in the water. A few years back a scuba diver was killed on one of the local wreck dives by one; I guess he went into cardiac arrest. There's no great place to have a heart attack, but underwater is definitely sub-optimal. Our boat captain, Joe, once managed to get a few stray tentacles off a wet suit onto his face and he said it was like someone had thrown a pan of hot grease in his face.

Runnin'

OK, forget what I said last time about switching from running to swimming. I've thought of a new long-term goal: to run Bogue Bank on the beach from inlet to inlet, which would be over 24 miles. I'm going to have to work up to this! I think it can be done, even though running on sand definitely seems to be more work than running on pavement. I've even started to think of some of the details, like that I should run from the southwest end of the island to the northeast so I'm running with prevailing winds. It'll probably take me 5 hours, so it's not something I can do at low tide, though I can avoid a high tide, and certainly a spring high tide, so I'll have room to run on compacted damp sand without getting my shoes wet.