We woke up at 6:30am as usual and headed out to the field site to search for our last instrument. This is our last chance, we have to leave tomorrow! We arrived at the site to find that the bar had migrated even more seaward and was now directly over where our Sontek should have been located. We were unable to get a metal detector reading on it due to all the added sand, even though we had gotten a reading yesterday. The rest of the day was spent packing up the truck and relaying information about our treasure hunt. We gave treasure hunting groups, metal detecting clubs, and information to the students at the University of West Florida about the coordinates of our instrument and the lure of a reward if they find it, and ship it back to us unharmed in College Station.

We were able to contact someone at the University of West Florida that let Chris borrow an underwater metal detector for the weekend. We stopped off at Lowe’s and picked up a shovel and some metal dowels to poke through the sand to find obstructions. Chris got right in the water looking for instruments at the points marked on the GPS where they were located before the storm while the research assistants started a post-storm high density survey. The higher wave activity and water level prevented us from doing a high resolution survey of the water. Chris was able to identify that certain instruments were in fact in the right locations but buried. We were able to pull out 2 RBR’s, and a Nortek instrument that were protruding from the sand. We started the downloading of the data from the instruments as soon as we got back to the condo since the Nortek takes more than 24 hours to download!

The surf was even higher on Wednesday when we headed out to our study site in the morning. Again, there wasn’t much we could do since we couldn’t get in the water so we spent most of our time warning surfers about the instruments. After being out there for the morning, we headed back indoors as a large portion of tropical storm 5 worked its way ashore.

This morning we turned on the Weather Channel with breakfast to hear that the tropical depression we had been keeping our eye on in the Gulf was most likely going to be heading in our direction and affecting us in the next few days. We anticipated that there may be a day or with very heavy surf due to the storm which would mean that it would probably be too dangerous for droguing. Chris gave the research assistants the day off to see the sights of Pensacola in anticipation of the hectic days ahead. While we went to see Fort Pulaski at the western-most tip of Santa Rosa Island and the Naval Aviation Museum, Chris had some fun with the drogues in the water before tropical depression 5 made landfall.

The field experiment is going smoothly and we have settled into what our daily tasks and days are like. We came back to our canopy on Saturday morning to find that people had used our chairs and broken some of our canopy during the night. We decided that we would start staying out a little later at night to watch our instruments. Luckily, the culprits only used our chairs and canopy and didn’t notice the instruments in the water.

Read More...