Day 3: Raft Challenge and more intertidal!

We were supplied three water barrels, five planks of wood of all different sizes, and different lengths of rope. They gave us an hour to build and get our rafts across the pond, where each member of the team had to touch the large rock on the other side. When we started building, everyone was a bit confused on how to begin, but we started to pick up the pace when the ideas started flowing. My team of Alexia (me), Ruby, Ben, and Mira's team got across the pond first and even made it back in one piece. The next two groups put their rafts in the water. When they were done, Stuart, Iris, Bella, and Amelia's raft spread out underneath them with their triangle design. Anna, Ayla, and Lincoln's group went out and their raft crumbled beneath them. My group ended up being able to create another design that had a cross like shape in the middle and got it the and back once again!

Stuart ended up going into the middle of the pond and attacking our group with splashing, and they were shoving each other’s rafts with their paddles. It was overall a really fun challenge and everyone had a lot of fun. By the end of the raft building challenge the sky had grown gray, and we all went down to the dock for a swim test, though only half of us did it since it got really cold. Those same people who took the swim test then jumped off the tall dock and everyone cheered for them, (if you want to see photos and videos from the raft challange and the dock jumping check it out on the blog page! It may take a few days for them to fully upload). We also saw a baby seal by the swim test dock! It was so cute and small it almost looked like a stuffed animal. We weren't allowed to give it any attention though, or else it would never leave. It did try to get on the dock a couple times and we could hear it crying, which made us all very sad. The worst part was that the seal had been here for two days, which most likely means that its mom abandoned it.

We then hung out and did some reading in our lobster books and played some chess and cards. Lunch was amazing once again; we had a coconut curry with potatoes and green salad  and the most amazing homemade bread rolls with paprika and scallion butter. A much needed lunch after all the excitement this morning. As the sky was still quite dark it looked like it was about to rain so we all suited up in our reaserch gear and headed out to the intertidal. Once we arrived it started to rain, quite hard may I add. We were all soaked by the time we left. Our group, (Alexia and Iris), got a ton of work done today. We went to six different tide pools and observed, counted, and measured, in each one. We counted the different species or organisms and how many there were of each. Some of them became percentages because counting 500 barnacles would not be a great use of our time. We also measured the fucus growth on surrounding rocks. It ended up getting windy and gross as we stayed out there and the fucus that covered all the rocks became extremely slippery and wet, and we almost fell a bunch times. The most interesting thing we found when we were out there was the crabs. Some were as big as  an inch while others were as small as a centimeter! We left early and headed to the Swallow's Nest to type up all of our data since our waterproof journals became a mess. We averaged out the lengths of the algae and updated our organism count spreadsheets. We ended up being able to see some of the photos and videos of the raft challenge later in the day from Marilyn's computer and it was all very funny. We especially liked the music playing in the background that