By Jack, Lynn, and Peder —

Today we barely opened our eyes around 6 o’clock. Lazily, we congregated for breakfast and then headed out to Andrew’s Bay North beach at Sharon’s house.

Sharon joined us for our survey. Here is a picture of Sharon with Tim.

We spent the morning investigating the differences between Andrew’s Bay North and the last intertidal zone, Andrew’s Bay South; we surveyed and compared what we saw.

The one major difference between Andrew’s Bay North and South is that the north end gets more sun. Together, we were looking to see what difference that would make in the intertidal zone.

We were very excited when we got a cool picture of an anemone and the rest of our data.

After all the festivities, we headed to an actual festival; the Pelindaba Lavender Farm Festival.

Photo by Lana Sachs

Our goal was to avoid killing or getting stung by any bees. It was a great sight for some group photos.

Later that day we went to the docks and enjoyed the sights and breeze. It was such a sunny day that we felt it would be a crime to stay indoors. However, our day was mostly spent so we decided to bicycle tomorrow.

Finally, we settled down to a lovely dinner of pasta and homemade red sauce with our two guests Katie Dobkowski and Darby Flanagan.

Photos by Seth Grant

Katie talked to us about the things she does as a field ecologist and her experiments with bull kelp. Darby then talked about how she has been extending upon Katie’s work by applying it to predation by kelp crabs as well.

Katie showed us what exactly we would be doing tomorrow and the methods she has used to mark kelp in the past.

Overall, we had a blast and felt prepared to help Katie get accurate data the next day.