Wednesday April 9, 2014

Today was the Day of Service at Tabor.  Although it was an early start (8:00 or so), it was a very fun day.  I woke up early and was in the lab shortly before 8 to do my water quality testing.  After I finished (around 8:30), I worked with Captain Bill's advisory to sort the oysters and check them over to see how they had wintered.  We counted them out into small piles of ten and then would check the piles to see how many had died, how many were doubles or triples, and how many had worm casings or other strange growths.  While I do not have the official results of our survey, I think the oysters weathered the winter pretty well.  Relatively few had died and they seemed to be in good health.

After sorting through all of the non-science oysters, we took a break and Mrs. Albright’s advisory came and sorted through the science classes’ oysters.  It was nice having Mrs. Albright’s advisory there, since Captain Bill’s (which is comprised of 3 sophomore/junior guys) was not very talkative.  They played music and chatted and were able to be productive which was a nice change from morose hungry guys.

Our next task was to put on waders and collect trash from the marshes around the waterfront.  We got to wear the waders, which is always pretty fun.  However, I got my foot stuck in the mud and when I tried to yank it out I fell over and plunged my arm into about a foot of mud.  Needless to say, I wasn’t as keen on wading around the marsh after that.
When we finished with community service a bit early, I took the opportunity to do my first weigh and measure.  To do it, I took my oysters and spilled them all on a lab bench in the MANS.  I took a sample set of 50 random oysters and weighed and measured them.  My plan is to take an average of the weight and length of 50 random oysters each week to track their overall growth.  My results are on the left.  In my sample, there were a few outliers, so I have highlighted them in blue, since I know they may be skewing the data.  I haven't decided weather or not to count these outliers, but in the picture to the left, they are counted in the average.

Overall today was a really good day.  After the two days of feeling unproductive, I think I got a lot of work accomplished.  The only downside was that my cold was pretty bad that afternoon, since I had been outside all morning in the freezing cold.  (It wasn’t actually that cold when you look at the weather reports, but I get cold very easily and the wind was blowing very strongly.)  I was also able to complete my goals for that day, which felt really good.