Some Days You Write the Blog, Some Days the Blog Writes You

Sorry for forgetting to blog yesterday, this routine thing isn’t really my strength. So on this day we tried to fill in the gaps in the Hydrology data. One of the areas we new we needed to cover was the main channel, which we were kind of leaving for later because we figured it would be easier (little did we know). One of the grad students, Emily, joined me and Gordan today to give us some help and to show us how to use some of the water quality instruments. We started out in the marshy areas near the bottom of the watershed and took some turbidity readings of the standing water, but quickly gave up because we were unsure where the ranch property ended and we didn’t want to get into any trouble. We moved on to the main stem, trying to start at the beach feeling like it would be easiest to work up from the outlet. Unfortunately, the stream outlet was a thick stand of mangrove trees and this invasive vine which grows all over the island, forming an impenetrable fortress of vegetation. WE spent the next few hours searching for open sections in the vegetation along the main stem that we could map. As it turned out, these sections were few and far between, leaving me relatively frustrated. The invasive vine grew would often grow all the way across the stream channel, reducing the amount of land we could actually map even more than what we had previously thought. We took more turbidity readings occasionally, trying to get a hold of how the suspended sediment levels changed throughout the valley.

After doing all we could on the main stem, we worked our way up a road along the north slope to try and delineate all the channels that fed into the main channel from that side of the valley. One interesting realization I came to during the stream walks was that none of the tributaries seemed to reach all the way to the main stem, yet the main stem was flowing with a strength that exceeded the inputs. This is something that I am considering researching further for my individual project. I don’t know what might result in these conditions, but I can certainly say that this valley is very unique. On a similar note, another anomaly about the valley is that the main stem goes underwater about 2/3rds of the way down the valley, but then resurfaces for the last 1/4 mile to the ocean.

After finishing up the North slope, we kind of ran out of steam and walked over to this mine we had heard about. It was located on the northeast end of the valley close to the ocean, and to my surprise the door was wide open. The mine shaft went back about 100 yards into the hillside and ended in what looked like a control room, with a rudimentary control board, what appeared to be a metal pump of some kind, and an hole in the floor that opened up into what appeared to be a deep pool of water. A pair of swim trunks was laying discarded on the ground next to the hole, which was both strange and kind of creepy. We walked back to base and soon headed back to Tradewinds.

We had free time until after dinner, when Briton and Paul came in to talk to each group and see where we were at. Briton gave me and Gordan some good pointers about what we needed to do to get our dataset ready for Sunday, when we would present our piece of the common product.