March 25th, 2011: Very Tired and Heading Home

Shannon and Billy from Scripps carrying REMUS.

Billy and Shannon deploying REMUS

When I wrote last time saying that things had been crazy, apparently I didn’t know how the next couple of days were going to go.  On the 23^rd, the Scripps group got permission to run their REMUS in Jelly Fish Lake to look at jelly fish biomass estimates.   Of course this meant that we needed to get the vehicle into the lake, which requires hiking uphill 150 feet and then downhill over treacherous limestone rocks with all of the gear that we needed.  We had a lot of help from the rangers working at the lake and Emilio from CRRF, which made it a lot easier, but it was still rough getting everything in.  We set everything up with lots of tourists looking over our shoulders and then had the vehicle circle around the lake for a couple of hours.  While the vehicle was underwater we got to relax and enjoy our surroundings.  After we were all finished we had to hike all of gear out and head back to the lab to put everything away. 

When we got back we found out that one of the instruments wasn’t working, which meant we needed to do the same thing again the next day.  None of us were excited, but we all still realized how cool it was to be doing this work so we sucked it up and hiked everything in and out again the next day with beautiful results.  We were going to do another run in the West Channel, but the currents were too strong so we ended up diving to retrieve our last instruments and then headed back to the lab.

Loading gear to go to airport.

After wearing ourselves out the over last two days, we now needed to pack up 2000 pounds of gear and take it to the airport to ship back home.  With only minutes to spare we finished up the paperwork and packing and went to drop everything off.  We returned to the lab to pack up all of our personal stuff, transfer data and take care of last minute things. 

We had some great experiences and worked really hard these last couple of days and now it is time to get on a plane and head for home so we can see our families and work up all the data that we gathered here in Palau.