Last field day: surveying

These days in the field are quite tiring, especially if you have to combine them with a session in the lab. After the surface sampling was done, I got one day in which I didn't have to go into the field. That meant I could do some admin associated with the field trip, and also with the dissertation module. But the day after I was back. After my morning lab session I brought the students to our headquarters, but only to mill around for hours. We had to wait for a batch of students who were doing the only activity we do at high water. The activity I was needed for was surveying, and you want to do that at low water. There's not much beach to survey at high tide!

The idea is that the students every year survey a set of survey lines that were designed by Natural Resources Wales. They do it the old-fashioned way, with a dumpy level and a staff. Nowadays one would do this with an expensive GPS, but we think it is important to teach them how to do it by hand.

Martin had assigned me the transact the furthest away from the car park. That is okay. I had an additional task; the idea is that that Natural Resources Wales has put some stakes in the ground to indicate the start of the transects. But the problem is; this is an eroding coast. They would put the stakes in the dunes, but the dunes are retreating like the clappers. Martin had been out to find them and he said there wasn't a trace of any of them. Luckily we have their coordinates, so at least we could go back to these locations. But if we started a transect we would have to survey in the start anew. And he gave me that as the additional task. I got the expensive GPS, and was expected to bring everyone to the start of their transect.

We drove to the main car park and I set up the GPS. I first brought Katrien to where her benchmark should have been. And she stayed behind with a few students. The student groups for this activity were just made right there and then. And the process repeated itself for the other two groups. Last year these benchmarks had still been there! Now all these positions were on the beach.

I then went on with the last three students. They were really nice, and clearly got along with each other. Our starting position was also on the beach. And we set up the tripod, and we started. We were on a very narrow part of the beach, but it was still before low water, so that beach would get bigger as time would pass.

I would have to say we had a lovely afternoon! Because the beach wasn't big we could survey in small steps, which meant we were never too far spread out. And that's sociable. And the mood was good. And the weather was as well. I also thought it went well; we had a 15 cm closing error and I think that not bad at all. But I was a bit tired so I was glad when we got it all finished.

The beach

Also the beach

Surveying

It was quite a long walk back to the parking lot, and it was quite late when we got there. So from there we didn't waste much time; we went to headquarters, unloaded the vehicles, let everybody do their things such as change their shoes or go to the loo, and then we set off again to bring the students back to Bangor. That was my part of the field trip done! The next day there would be a few more students doing the high water measurements, and there was an opportunity for the students to work on their field notebooks, but I had Martin’s OK to not be there for that. So I could go home and get ready for what the weekend was throwing at me. The week had flown by!