Hello blog readers!

Sorry we haven’t posted anything in over a week! It’s been very busy with our first community meeting, a visit from the Boss lady (Clare) and attending a national fisheries meeting today. I think Pia has also developed a fear of the blog…I’m hoping a few rums later in the week might help her over it! There is no weekend fun to report about as we’ve been constantly working… (sad face and small violin).

The community meeting was great – we got about 17 people talking about fishing, tourism and the community, creating these huge wall maps and timelines of different marine activities in Sandy Ground. I think everyone who attended had a really good time and we certainly learnt a lot! We introduced the ipads for mapping and it was just lovely to see our strapping, young Anguillan helpers putting dots on the maps where the older ladies used to swim and take their ‘seabaths’.

As I said we have been fortunate to have Clare with us all week. It meant I got to shoot off round the island in the car showing her the sights, all the beautiful beaches, the desalinization plant, the power station the pilot agriculture project etc. etc. all the sites environmental scientists get excited about. Much to Clare’s disappointment I couldn’t quite locate the entrance to the landfill site so we settled by taking pictures of the erosion at Gwen’s Reggae bar while eating a fish sandwich.

We also got Clare doing some interviews. At the moment we are working in a small village called North Hill. I dropped Clare and Pia off outside one of our randomly selected addresses and as they both walked towards the house we became aware of the most enormous black bloke, standing in his underwear holding a large knife. I started to worry that I maybe this wasn’t a good idea, and I kept the engine running just in case they needed a quick escape… but it turned out they were a very friendly couple. The guy was chopping up a lion fish (hence the knife) and his wife was the lead singer in a band… so on Sunday we went down to the beach to watch her perform… most excellent.

I’ve put some photos up but I am hoping Pia will write about what she remembers most from the last week. I want to shout out to my mum whose birthday it is on Saturday – Happy birthday mum – I’m so sorry I am missing it again ;( x x

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”!

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!