Kate's Day 4: Fieldwork Day 2: Willapa Bay

After being a little bit too late for the tide the day before, we woke up at 4:30am and arrived at the site as it was still partially flooded. Not entirely knowing how deep some of the channels on the way to the site were, we hung out and watched shore birds and Brants for a while, and enjoyed the sights in the estuary.

We managed to just barely get 3 reference quadrats done before the tide crept up on us. I was madly collecting eelgrass and doing a random quadrat to survey for macroalgae (at each site we tried to get 20 of these done - measuring percent cover and number of eelgrass shoots and then stuffing a ziploc bag full of whatever kinds of drift/attached seaweed was also present in the quadrat).
It was another long day. We grabbed some more coffee, this time at the new coffeeshop in Ocean Park, and returned to the resort whereupon we threw our fieldwork stuff everywhere we possibly could to try to dry it out (after rinsing off as much estuarine mud as possible) , and proceeded to process the samples. More measuring of eelgrass, and then sorting the macroalgae and determining the wet weight of each sample from each quadrat.



Finally it was dinner time and we could put together another gourmet meal; this time was to celebrate cinco de Mayo!! We did our best with some Dos Equis, guacamole and salsa, and burritos!