Abi's Deep Dive

I am getting stuff done!!

I’ve taken over a few jobs now at work, and made a spreadsheet to keep a record of staff on call days and days off. It’s beautiful. It took ages and was a case of remembering long forgotten Excel training from my MA in Management. In the words of my FiG colleagues “who knew”!

We have had a few cases of dengue so we now need an emergency action plan for that, one of our other bases has also had a few cases so I’m working with the base manager there to put one together. We had no truck for a while as it was being repaired, laundry was stacking up (we don’t have a washing machine so we take it to a local laundrette) and doing a proper food shop became harder work using a taxi. Now the truck is back, laundry is fine and food shelves are stocked!

When I was in Mexico last year I started working on a fundraiser for the daughter of our boat captain. I put together some questions for Hilario, the captain, and wrote a page to try to get donations to put towards Alison’s medical care as she has moyamoya. When I left, I left the info with someone else to get a page up and running but it didn’t happen so I was keen to finally get that done. This week the page went live!!

https://gofund.me/983a23a2

I am getting ready to go to Chinchorro which is an island off the coast further south. We will leave on Monday at 4.30am, drive down to Mahahual, then take all of our kit into a boat to go to Chinchorro. It’s a protected area so there are lots of restrictions for going to the island.

We can’t take any toiletries, non recyclable products or insect repellant to name a few, but we can take toothpaste! 6 of us are going, 3 scientists and 3 of us from GVI and will be sleeping in hammocks in a palafito. We are there to monitor conch with our partners from CONANP. We have to survey the conch in set areas all around the island, by setting up zones, freediving to gather all of the conch within that area, then taking them up to the boat to measure them and record the info. CONANP decides when the numbers are good enough to allow fishing. We have to complete all of the surveys before we can come home, and if the weather stops play we stay until we can finish. We should be back on Friday if not delayed. Crocodiles and bull sharks inhabit the water so I’m really hoping to get some good photos. I am so excited for this opportunity!! So few people get to stay on the island, I’ll be prepared with long sleeves to protect from mosquitoes and I’m looking forward to seeing the stars with no artificial lights to drown them out, and listening to the sounds of the creatures while we sleep. The fishermen cook for us every night, we take water with us, so red wine and steak is on the menu tonight!!

I’ll give you an update as soon as I can!