The Boat

Often I have spoken of The Boat to my friends and family, but unless you work at PISCO, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about when I say 'The Boat'. I'm usually always talking about a specific boat, and that boat is the Elakha. It's a lovely little boat, and today our class got to do some trawling up and down the bay. Well, half of our class got to do trawling. My half on the other hand, we had a little adventure instead.

We cruised up the bay a little way, heading towards the third in a series of five trawl sites that our instructor has done over the last decade, so we were headed to gather more data for his monitoring series.It was a great day to be out on the water. While the sun was shining there was a bit of a breeze which meant that you could stand out on the deck and hang out but could still bundle up in fleeces. I love bundling up in fleeces. Here's a photo of me at the rail, in my ever so stylish PFD. Yay for safety!

When we got to the first trawl site some folks volunteered to help set the trawl. This may be where it all began to go wrong. Our team didn't have the smoothest launch of them all, and we almost lost some people over the side as the net drug out behind the boat and stretched out. Once set, we let it trawl for about 10 minutes before trying to pull it in. All of a sudden we heard a large noise and felt the line shudder and the boat do a double take. Then the line went slack. The net had snagged on something. We pulled the line in by hand only to find that the bridles were completely broken off at the chain. Our net, and thus our efforts at trawling that day were completely over.

So instead of doing the trawling we got to take a little ride around the bay. Not as exciting, but still fun. ALSO: Check out the "Fish dissection" post for some photos of Trista and I getting friendly with our fish...