So, my summer and fall plans were set. But there's one other adventure I haven't told you about yet. One of the biggest reasons I joined the shark tracking project was the promise of a trip to Santa Catalina Island, California, during the week after spring exams to test all of our work. I was particularly excited about this as it would be my first opportunity to visit the West Coast (before this, I'd only just been west of the Mississippi River when I went to St. Louis, MO over fall break for a medieval ball, and that was because the airport we flew out of just happened to be on the west bank ;]). A good friend of mine, with whom I planned to room next year until I made the decision to study abroad, lives very close to Long Beach and I explored visiting her either before or after the trip, but her final exam the weekend before and piano recital and marathon the weekend after precluded that opportunity. I still hope to visit her sometime, but it has been indefinitely delayed.
There was one more flurry of activity before we left as I realized, rather suddenly, that the free study abroad storage provided to me by the university (which conveniently also extended over the summer) was only available to me before I left. It was a frantic three days of collecting my entire room into four piles: bring to Germany, store at Princeton, store with friends (anything I needed until the day I left or wouldn't fit in a box) and send home to have at Christmastime (which opportunity was only graciously provided by the wonderful Danielle, who happened to be visiting relatives in Boston the same weekend my mother and sister were going there for college visits). Somehow it all got done, and my amazing, wonderful, servant-hearted boyfriend helped me trek no less than five small boxes, 2 under-bed totes, 2 plastic chests-of-drawers, and three large boxes across campus in the blazing heat to the basement where they will rest (hopefully) undisturbed until my return in February... I only dread lugging them back out in the dead of winter without his help, let's hope it's another snowless one!
We planned to be in California for nearly a week; flying out Sunday morning and returning Saturday morning. Packing was quite the ordeal; to save on shipping costs, my advisor wanted us to bring many of the materials and robots with us as checked baggage instead of FedExing them across the country. I didn't want to have to check a bag in both directions but didn't own something that I could either leave in California or fold up into my carry-on, so instead I volunteered to bring the PVC piping for the sensor frame and extra material for the steering fins. When I finally began packing two days before departure (which is actually pretty good, usually I pack the night before :P) I discovered that the two-foot lengths of PVC were too long for any of my carry-on bags which were a maximum 22'' long. After emailing the group several times about this problem and getting no response or suggestions to buy a mailing tube to check the pipe (which I thought very silly and unnecessary), one of the other students on Saturday night FINALLY said that he could probably fit the pipe in his checked bag. They slid in without any problem, of course, and took up hardly any space, and we were off. We did each end up having to check a bag, for which our advisor promised to reimburse us later, but I was skeptical as I would be in the country only a few days after our return before being abroad for seven months, and I doubted he could get an official reimbursement in that time (I was correct - he ended up handing me a $20 bill in the airport and saying "I owe you $5", but I doubt I'll ever get it... oh well, everything else was paid for so it's nothing in the long run :P). We all got to Los Angeles without incident, where we met the other professor we would be working with, a marine biologist who works at CalState Long Beach. We drove to our (more than a little) sketchy hotel for the night after transferring the important equipment to the biologist's 26-foot boat for transport the next morning.
We got an early start in the morning, catching the 8:30 Catalina Express over to the island. Catalina Island boasts itself as "California's Only Island Resort" and it's been kept amazingly wild, for California. Apparently a lot of Westerns were shot on the island and it now has an imported population of buffalo (unfortunately we didn't see any of these during our trip). There are really only two towns on the island, Avalon and Two Harbors, and the rest is mostly undisturbed desert-grassland with only a couple of dirt roads to get from place to place. We stayed in a house in Two Harbors, a beautiful three-bedroom, two-bath arrangement where the other female student and I took over the master bath and bedroom upstairs and left the first floor bedroom and couches to the two boys and the professor. The facility where we worked was one harbor over from Two Harbors; about a mile by boat and three by road. Each morning the biologist, who slept on the boat all except the last night, would drive over to the pier at Two Harbors around 7am to pick us up, and we would start the day with hot breakfast in the research facility's cafeteria at 7:30 before getting to work. The cooks were amazing and made really good food. We always had bacon for breakfast, which made me happy :) The weather was amazing while we were there, sunny and 70 every day. Unfortunately there was more than a little breeze from the north-west which made it a bit chilly most days, and I had only brought one light jacket (after all, we're in California!) so I was often a tad uncomfortable. But the weather was the least of my complaints.
As I've already explained, I stayed away from the coding aspects of the project during the year. The goal of our Catalina trip was to test the new, multi-robot system. Since what I had done first semester dealt with the particle filter, which at this point we were doing post-processing and not real-time (not to mention, that my methods had made it worse, not better), and my second semester work was determining the best frame configuration, I didn't really have anything in progress that I could work on during the week. The other students worked hard at implementing the modem, debugging their controller code, and creating a user interface so we could control the robots. In the meantime, when I wasn't helping take the robots apart or put them back together, I sat in a corner twiddling my thumbs and (almost) wishing I had done something more complicated or not finished it by the time we got to Catalina. I don't like feeling unproductive or like I can't contribute, so it was really hard for me to accept that the menial tasks I was doing were as helpful to the project as the other students' contributions. Sleep was also an issue, as the professors and other students seemed happy to work far into the night, often not returning to Two Harbors until after midnight. I resented not having the opportunity to sleep a full eight hours in a night - I've never been a good "low-sleep" person and knew that I would need all the energy in my reserves to make it through my incredibly busy last weekend in the US. I got so fed up that one night at about 11pm I asked my advisor if I could do anything else to help, and when he (a little peevishly as he prefers self-starters, which as I noted before, I am not) replied that there wasn't, I announced that I would walk back to the house. I was only about 70% serious (and will admit that I was being a little bit of a drama queen) but when neither my advisor nor the biologist seemed flustered by my declaration, merely saying "go ahead, then. It's pretty safe", the tables were turned upon me. It was actually one of the best experiences of the week, hiking back silently in the dark (I had a flashlight but didn't use it) on the winding dirt road by the light of the full moon. At one point I startled a large doe standing not ten feet off the road, who couldn't decide whether I was a real threat and so stood there, majestic in the moonlight, as I strode past. I covered the three-plus miles in about forty minutes, but had been back at the house for less than a quarter of an hour before I heard the others tromp in. Still, that hour was better-spent in my opinion than it would have been had I chosen to stay and mope in the lab until we all packed up for the night.
One of the biggest redeeming factors of my time in California was the daily snorkel we enjoyed just before dinner on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The water still only being about 60˚F, we used wetsuits. Initially I protested about this (I've swum in water FAR colder than 60˚) but after seeing what was IN the water I was quite glad for the extra protection. I don't think I've yet fully explained why we chose Catalina Island as our research station. The goal of our project being to track sharks, we needed to go somewhere we could find them. It just so happens that the bay that the CalState Long Beach research facility is on is a very popular place for female leopard sharks to congregate, right in the shallows next to the shore. The researchers postulate that these are pregnant females, and the warmer water in the shallows helps speed up the gestation process. In any case, the sharks gather there in swarms during spring afternoons, milling around to soak up the warm water. Leopard sharks stay rather small, growing to only about 6 feet in length. They have long, thin bodies, with the largest ones only being about as big around as an adult man's thigh. They are a quite harmless and docile species, and they have very small teeth with which they feed on worms and other small bottom-dwelling creatures. Nonetheless, it was an awe-inspiring and slightly unnerving experience to be floating there in three feet of water and be surrounded by no less than two dozen sharks. They quickly skittered away if I paddled forward, but if I lay still for long enough they would cease to be wary of me and even swim right underneath, their petite dorsal fins nearly grazing my belly on their way by. On the first day I almost didn't dare move as they came close, but after being reassured by the biologist that he had never seen anyone bitten by a leopard shark, on the second and third days I slowly drifted my hands down into the sharks' path and would let my fingers skim across their backs as they swam by. They didn't seem bothered by this, and their skin was surprisingly soft for everything I'd heard about sharkskin being used by ancient peoples as sandpaper. The important part is, I TOUCHED A SHARK!!! Not only a shark (for there was both a 1-foot horn shark and a 2-foot swell shark in the touch tank at the lab, which I regularly petted on my way by) but one nearly as large as myself!! Seeing the beauty of the kelp forest and experiencing the thrill of swimming in the middle of the shark swarm more than made up for all of my feelings of inadequacy and uselessness. (P.S. I discovered through this experience that though I'm petrified of spiders, which in 99.9% of cases can do nothing to me, I'm not scared of sharks which are much more likely to do me damage... go figure!)
 |
| No zoom - I was actually this close. Don't worry, these are the little ones. |
And so I had my first experience of California. My advisor didn't seem to mind that I wasn't pulling my weight (or so I felt), so overall it was a positive one. Fortunately our flight was changed at the last minute from a red-eye leaving at 10pm to an afternoon flight arriving then, so I didn't lose another night of sleep (though I still napped for the majority of the plane ride even though I tried to stay awake and see the country from the air...). My advisor, who was also returning to his house in Princeton, called us a shuttle from the airport and I enjoyed a rather pleasant hour's ride back to my dorm during which we discussed his views on education and parenting, and I got to hear plenty of stories about his children. As I said before, he is a wonderfully laid-back person and would make a great friend, but his approach to independent research and mine differed too much for him to make a good advisor for me. Yet I still learned from my experience and enjoyed California, so I would say that this year, all told, was a success. It certainly went out with a bang, as I will describe in my next post!!
