Sunrise in the field

After the not very successful morning in the field with my master student, we need to go back and improve on our performance. It took us a while to get to that point, but after Easter we had two days booked out. We would try to do all three field sites in these two days. And we had to do them in my little car, as one School vehicle was in the garage, and the other one was in an even worse state. And the tide times were not convenient.

The first day we would meet in Bangor at 5:30. It was surprisingly easy to get out of bed and get my arse into gear! And when I got to main campus, I noticed first light at the horizon. When Finley appeared we headed for the first site: Dulas. We wanted to resample the locations of an earlier student.

At Main Arts just before dawn 

When we parked up, the estuary was bathing in an absolutely gorgeous sunrise. We first took a few pictures! Then we switched on the GPS, and headed out to the most distant sample site.

It was a bit of a walk, and it was a bit difficult to navigate to the exact spot. I thought I had managed to define stake point that the GPS would navigate me to, but I didn't quite. At least the machine knew where we were, quite unlike the previous time!

Looking away from the sunrise it doesn't look so glamorous

Altogether it took us a lot more time than it would have if we would just have decided on samples spots there and then. I doubted we would be able to do the second site as well, but it wasn't far away, so we could at least have a look. So after we got back to the car, we drove to the harbour of Amlwch. The tide had indeed risen too much by then, and it wasn't feasible to sample that location as well. At least we got an idea of where you can park, and how you can get into the harbour in a practical way. And the weather has turned poor; I didn't quite mind getting back into the car and having coffee and brownie. I had had breakfast before 5 am; now it was almost 9 and I was hungry!

Amlwch harbour 

I drove Finley back to Bangor, and told her to keep me posted on how she wanted to proceed. We still had the evening low tide, and the early low tide next morning. Did she want to do both sites? Or just one? And later she emailed me to say she intended to go back to Amlwch that evening, without me, and that she wanted to do the third location together, early the next morning. So that was decided then! And I could just go do some work in the office, and just hope that the next day we would get an equally beautiful morning in the field…