On and upwards ... to Hawai'i

So chapter 2 is pretty much done - yes, I am excited (understatement!). It's in my supervisor's hands right now, so I am waiting to hear back from him to make the final adjustments and tweaking required before I can send it off to be published. No doubt there'll be more iterations to go through after that (when does it ever end!!!), but for now I can move on to the next items on the ever so long to do list!! ... and that would be tackling my ecopath model for Kaloko Honokohau National park in Hawai'i. I tell you it's not an easy feat to try to find what may be the biomass of critters living in the park's marine mud and sand. Or what about how much of what a monk seal eats per year? A spinner dolphin? or what would you say the growth of different urchin species are? Gets you delving deep into the literature and the web searches always somehow take longer than you expect... and the questions to which someone must for sure have already found an answer... keep you guessing. You come across some pretty weird and interesting research along the way though, such as measuring the sinking rates of differently sized phytoplankton - we're talking MINUSCULE things here! Whoever does this over and over to calculate everything with reliable statistics is armed with far more patience than I could ever dream of harbouring!!
I want to be able to get my model going and start balancing things (i.e. get a draft model) within the next 10 days. That would mean that I could get a draft report for around mid April, with my ultimate goal being to have this next chapter done by the end of April. All this timing is pretty hecticly tight - but I really want to make it happen; and I think I can as long as I stick to a pretty healthy work ethic... mixed up with exercise of course so I don't lose the plot entirely!

Otherwise, my friend Barry has been visiting. He's on his way 'home' to Barbados from Australia, via the Solomons, Tanzania and Europe where he'll be leading his 12th turtle season. He's been keeping me entertained with his stories of turtle monitoring activities and diving in some of the most remote and at times mesmerising parts of this world. Makes me miss being in the field like crazy!!!