Traveling was a blast. Yeah, ok, not really. Sat next to a "space invader" on my first flight who didn't speak any English which was much less than pleasant. Upgraded to Economy Plus for the second flight which was quite a bit better, but after not sleeping a bit Monday night for the first flight I'm not sure it made much difference. I did read an entire book from start to finish though in one sitting which I haven't done in a long time, so that was kind of exciting, of course it was a big long forced sitting, but one sitting none-the-less. Waited almost an hour for our rental car to show up (it was "in the car wash", but we actually saw the person who had it before us drive it onto the lot about 30 min into our wait...and then it was in the car wash) then I drove us from San Juan to Rincon (about 2.5 hours with a bunch of lovely traffic).
This year Mary and I have 3 of the regular SECORE guys here to help us with the coral spawn collection, i.e. diving, collecting larvae, etc. Eric Borneman from the University of Houston, Brian Nelson from New England Aquarium and Mike Henley from the National Zoo (if you're unaware, the National Zoo is who Mary and I are actually employed by). It's a great group to have help us this year and things are going fairly smoothly so far. We picked Mike and Brian up in San Juan and Eric met us here in Rincon as he got in the night before (on a 7 hour late flight...poor Eric!). We arrived to no power in the rental houses and ate a lovely catered dinner by a headlamp hanging from the light fixture on our porch. The lights promptly came on about 30 minutes after we were done eating. Not much to do last night, we were all tired and turned in fairly early.
Got up this morning and went to the storage unit where we had most of the SECORE equipment. Iliana Baums from Penn State is here as well and has a house about a hundred yards or so down the beach, so we divved up the equipment with her. She has a few SECORE folks here to help her as well, so it was nice to see them too. Actually, her house has internet and our two don't, so I'm sitting here in there nice living room at the moment...
Mary and I got our stuff unpacked for the most part and our lab set up in the top of the yellow house on the beach. Eric and I already did a run to Home Depot and KMart and (fingers crossed) hopefully we won't have to do too much more this year which is a relief if any of you know how many times I had to go to those two stores last year and the year before! We are waiting for a few more packages to arrive from DC. The only super-snag we have had so far is that for some reason FedEx delivered 6 of the 7 boxes that I shipped out from Hawaii. It sent the 7th box back! Argh! No idea why, and they can't tell me. I've had two 20 minute FedEx phone conversations so far today and had to have the wonderful Grau lab assistant Ryan take the box to FedEx in Kaneohe to have it go out again today. Everyone keep your fingers crossed as it is a box of scintillation vials that we need for housing our coral larvae to test if our cryopreserved sperm is functional when we thaw it. This is pretty much the most important thing we are here to do, so they really need to get here ASAP. Think Happy FedEx thoughts folks!
Other than that, I've gotten 3 fire ant bites so far today, the mosquitoes are swarming around me, it's super-hot and supposed to get hotter tomorrow, but everyone's in good spirits and things are good overall. I think we are going to have a good field season here. Watch this space for pics from today (I forgot my cable at the other house to upload my pictures, but will do so later). There's a really great one of Mike Henley with his special surprise that Eric and I got him earlier today. More updates to come.
Aloha!
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