Time is flying….

And I am still trying to catch up on our weekend adventures!

After a long night in the Pump House, with a life band playing and people teaching me Caribbean style dancing- will have to practice soon if I can still move my bum without moving either my legs or shoulders next time- we had a lie-in on Sunday. We then decided to explore a bit more of the South coast, and take our snorkelling gear (I just bought new mask and snorkel on Saturday, and went for a nice swim in Feathers Bay. Sarah was lucky enough to see a barracuda following her, but sadly as soon as I turned around he was gone!!!

Next we decided to go to Savannah Bay, further up in the East- and this took our low lying black pimp car to a real test! Off the road it went- and let me tell you, I really really now miss my little blue car!!! Little Blue would have loved it, black pimp car had to work very hard to go across all the rocks, drains etc… into the middle of no-where. And then we arrived, at the end of the road- and there was a small little remote beach cafe, complete with a 1 day old baby goat resting behind some chairs. And there I had some absolutely amazing fish (to eat). The little goat was very curious and came to say hello and nibble on my fingers, very brave little thing.

Well fed we went to explore the beautiful empty beach, and went snorkelling… there were plenty of fish, and we were just about skimming over the remains of the reefs. And suddenly I got trapped! I had no idea where to go any more, the waves slightly pushed us up and down, but I was so close to the bottom, and all the crevices were covered with spiky sea urchins! This was the first time ever in my life that I got really panicky in the water- and that in 30 cm deep water!

However, once out of there I have to say it was a fantastic day it was!

And the black car did a good job- I guess it never imagined it would ever be challenged that badly in its life!!

There’s been so much going on Pia and I are both writing blog posts today!

We are getting some great information from the interviews.  This week we focused on ‘key informants’ (makes them sound like prison rats!) – people who should have a lot to say about the sea.  One of the questions we ask ‘do you know of any rules or regulations related to the sea?’.  Most people say they have heard about the ban on turtle fishing, and when we ask if this rule is enforced, the response is generally ‘yes’ because there was this one guy who got caught with turtle meat and had to pay an $8000 fine!… I’ll come back to this..

Somebody asked what we do all day……..So, we’ve been happily driving around introducing ourselves, arranging interviews, conducting interviews and entering the data.  We are using Dragon software which is a headphone you speak into and it types out what you say – very cool.  Pia and I both have sore throats because we are literally talking ALL day 😉  About 5:00pm we’ll go down to the beach, have a beer, maybe some dinner and try and pick up some more interviews for the next day.  Lately we’ve had quite a few interviews later in the evening.  We also use the time to catch up on work e-mails, make plans for the community meetings, write reports / blogs / plans etc.

Dawn – the lovely lady who we rent our car and villa from, put us in touch with her brother who is a fisherman.  One conversation over the phone with Pia and he were hooked on each other.  We were immediately invited around for dinner on Friday night!  This guy is a REAL character, kinda got the gay hospitality thing going on, tells tales like a sea dog, hates authority and is funny as hell.  We laugh our way through the evening with his random assortment of guests eating freshly prepared creole snapper, veggies, passion fruit lassi’s, sweet potato and some kind of polenta thing made by rolling your hips around.  He made us drink his special tea made from Moringa and lemongrass (look it up – it has amazing properties including 100’s of health benefits and is an aphrodisiac).  We never actually got to the interview but the conversation comes round to fishing…. He gets his spear gun out from under the bed, talks about the fish he catches and mentions that turtle meat is soooo sweet… then they all laugh…. And it suddenly clicks!  The first fricking dinner we go to is at the house of the guy everyone’s been talking about – the fool that got caught with turtle meat!  Not the best image for two marine conservationists!!  He said it was his wife – a judge from Dominica who he was going through a divorce with who called the fisheries department to dob him in as an act of revenge.  He was so animated saying that the governor, the chief magistrate and the chief minister had all been around his house for thanksgiving eating turtle a few months before!  All in all a wonderful night.

I suppose I should briefly mention that Saturday we hired a great, young Anguillan to work with us on the surveys, we saw a man, go at another ma,n on the beach with a machete (some kind of family feud).  We also went to the pump house for dinner, met some lovely people, danced to the live band, and Pia transfixed the locals with her German hips! 😉  “Keep circular movements between the chest and the knees”!

Now our “real” work begins… no more scoping and wandering about!
Excited and all prepared we went down to Sandy Ground Bay to find our first victims, ehm, interviewees… we should call them ;\… This first Monday morning we found 3 fishermen, sitting outside a bar – perfect. We started the interview with one of them… but half way through he got called away… will have to complete this interview another day. The other two were a bit frightened off by that time (but we will interview them ;-))
The trials of a social researcher… what to do when you go to one of your random households to do an interview, and suddenly a pack of dogs comes charging towards you? You stay in the car!!! But, as we needed to get to the door, or somewhere closer, I ventured out- and I DO love dogs- and they seemed all right at first, but then they were all around me- there were 5 of them, plus, at least, six puppies (could have been more), so when the big chief dog decided to growl at me, they all started charging towards me!!! So I jumped into the car, we closed the windows, and Sarah took us out of there with screeching tires. This house is off the list!!! Even now I hear them barking, as the house is quite close to ours… wonder which poor person they are chasing now!!! We need doggie Biscuits!!!!!
So we then decided to do essential shopping and preparations for community meeting and other vital things, and in the evening decided to check out our random household locations to make “appointments” for the next day. After being chased by dogs out of one house, we will go back there, we finally found two households for household interviews for the next day, two resource users and one KI (key informant) interview.
Tuesday!!
BIG interview day! Our first interview was a KI interview with the superintendent of Ports… we got through his security, handed in our driving licences, we then realized we had forgotten the folder with the questionnaires in our kitchen!!! So he, nicely, printed out his own interview questionnaire 
The next interview was a bit of a not-very informative meeting, but at least at 12pm we were ready for lunch at the beach, get changes and off to our next interview (the one we, or at least I, had been looking forward to –or actually not really the interview itself…). We met Paul and his cute dog Camber (a Portuguese Waterdog- apparently the same as President Obama has, though he called it something else because he supports Romney!!! Damn Republicans!), who is the manager and single employee of the Anguillian Youth Sailing Club, operating out of Sandy Ground. So, after the interview they (him and Camber) took us out for a cruise around the harbour on a little Hobie-Cat (a little fun catamaran) – fantastic fun (so that’s why I was so excited about the interview ). Eventually he got us capsized and all floating in the sea! I was going after some water bottle and Kemba wanted to be rescues by me and tried to climb on my shoulders!!! I AM a lifeguard, but have you ever had to do with a big “drowning” dog?? And hey, once she realized I would not carry her, she could swim faster than me after the drifting off boat! In the whole chaos Sarah lost her sunglasses as well!-Later we heard from his boss that this seems a common thing for him with girls… he only had to get rescued the other week.
Great fun and sooo exciting!
Just my kind of interview!
The next interview (and our first random household interview) was with Ann, a retired teacher who also runs a small lodge/hotel on Sandy Ground. She had a lot of knowledge on the history of Anguilla, and told us some fantastic stories about an animal with tentacles that got washed into salt pond. Anguilla has a number of massive salt ponds which were used over many years to harvest salts. It would be pumped off and processed and shipped to many places in the world. Nowadays the salt pumps have stopped working as there are cheaper ways to get to salt, and the ponds provide a unique habitat for many seabirds. One of those salt ponds just harbours onto Sandy Ground, the sea is on one side, then the beach, some houses, a road and the salt pond. At some times of the year there is access from the sea to the salt ponds. This was how this animal got from the sea into the salt pond where it bit her grandson and seems to be killing birds.
When the boy came past later he said he said that the mystery creature was actually a stingray!!
Ann had a huge knowledge about how people used to live in Anguilla with the hurricanes over the years. Now, all the wooden houses that used to line sandy ground are replaced by cement based houses to make them less susceptible to hurricanes.
The last interview of this really long day, which we decided to turn from a household interview to a KI interview (after recommendation), we had in a pub in the evening. The pub is the Pumphouse and is actually the place where the salt was pumped out of the pond… there are still the actual machines inside! I should take a picture, this is so cool.
And, after a long and fun interview, we indulged in some drinks (dark and stormy for me, rum and coke for Sarah) we had time to enjoy some fantastic life reggae music!
Such a fantastic and long day, and we learned so much! One of the facts, for example, that the reef outside Sandy Ground was formed by boulders that Portuguese sailors brought in the 18th century as counterweight for when they picked up the salt from the salt ponds. Another interesting fact is that turtle meat is apparently very tasty and that the turtle fishing ban is apparently one of the best working marine regulations out here.
After so much fun on Tuesday, we spent Wednesday mainly in our accommodation transcribing interviews, and now I am still sitting here at 9 PM writing…
For the first time we had Roti today, which is a Caribbean/local street food- and it surely was delicious (if we have this every day we will be able to roll everywhere instead of walk ;-))

Such an exciting day…

At 9 am we met Ivor at the radio station with our first attempt to radio stardom! We were live on air in a one hour long chat show at the first Anguillan Radio station, Radio AXA! And… when we were about to leave, a lady had already called in for information, and Kafi, from fisheries, actually called us in the studio   J How great is that?

FOR: ANGUILLA on the radio with Ivor at Anguilla Radio

And so we went off to the fisheries department, where Kafi and some colleagues had just returned from a lionfish hunt- bringing back four fish, which got their photographs and post-mortem done on the back of a pickup truck. They were called B4, B5, Big B and Little B.

After all this excitement of one morning we decided we needed lunch, and, after some more work at home moved our office down to Roy Beach Grill on Sandy Ground for some scoping and beer. So we stayed for happy hour as well- when we were there already. It was packed with retired American Expats, we had not seen as many white people in one place in Anguilla before!

Once we had finished our fantastic meal we decided we needed to get a better feel of the community and needed to explore other places… so we moved on to Elvis’, and the name says it all J

All in all a very successful day of work and scoping!

Our first full day in Anguilla!! We are still getting acclimatized and exploring the island in our “trusty” black gangster pimp car.

First stop was our 11 am meeting with the Department of Environment. We had a very informative chat and were given some valuable contacts in and around Anguilla. A nice GIS person did even produce some maps for us, of Anguilla and more detailed of the three communities we will be working in.

The rest of the day was spent exploring the Island and the three communities: Island Harbour, Sandy Ground and West End.

We went down all the way to Sandy Ground, which we can overlook from our balcony, and, to get into the real spirit, had lunch at Johnnos Beach Bar.

After a walk along the beach we decided to be adventurous and driving up the hill to see what was there, away from the tourist villas. Local people seemed to be quite concerned that we had got lost, and were offering advice!

On our way up towards the valley we stopped our gangster car- which, once we were on a nicely paved road started making strange noises and wobbling- on the curb to take a view over the ocean… and again concerned locals stopped next to us, asking whether our car was alright! Makes you really feel safe to see people are concerned, but we decided not to stop any more on the curb, after all, we do not know how well our car will manage the roads here in Anguilla…it is definitely  too low for all the speed bumps, and even worse, the reverse speed bumps- or ditches.

We drove up to Island Harbour, but instead ended up in Shoal Bay first. The map seems to be a bit old, especially when the yellow main road turns to be out to be more of a track while the small, white line, is a smooth tarmac road!

On the way out of Shoal Bay we suddenly passed a building looking like a massive, unfinished Dalek!

Next stop: Island Harbour! Before leaving the UK, we got given three envelopes to deliver, for three people based/living  in Island Harbour. We intended to deliver the first one, but he was not around, nor was any of the other two; instead we had a nice chat with a fisherman called Roy.

On the road again, having a drive through the village once again a nice local asked whether we were lost… they just could not understand why we would want to drive through the village!

Last stop for the day: West End! We travelled more or less from one end of Anguilla to the other in approximately 35 minutes; that is my daily commute to work in Newcastle!! We drove literally to the end of the road and ended up in front of an Italian Beach restaurant, opposite one of the famous salt ponds. This end of the island is dominated by masses of holiday villas.

After a drink and a walk along the beach, where we found large amounts of diadema, we drove home to our own villa and fell quite tired into bed… looking forward to day 2!!!

And in the beginning was the word, and the word was FOR.

Well, Future Of Reefs in a changing environment!

This is the informal research project blog for the FOR project.  Myself – Sarah Young, and my partner in crime – Pia Schuchert, are going to be providing regular updates over the next 6 months on our experiences collecting data on coral reefs in three rather exciting countries: Anguilla, Turks and Caicos and the Cayman Islands. Join us on our journey and see how the research progresses.

We shall post some introductory pages on the goals, methods, background to the project over the weekend.

Wish us luck!