Lab tour

I figured it was probably time to give a tour of the lab and show you what exactly it's like down here.  As i said before, the lab is located on South Bimini and, at the moment, the fourteen people living here probably account for 1/5 of all people on the island.

The lab (right) is small but comfortably functional with five small dorm rooms, a kitchen/dining room, two bathrooms, and a science lab/gear room.  There's also a nice deck that you can see in the picture.  Four sheds are located outside the lab and they hold most of the larger equipment such as large gill nets, long lines, and fish seines.

We wake up every morning at 8 am to eat breakfast, although i usually don't stumble in till about 8:15 or so; no real surprise there. After breakfast most of the volunteers usually go back to bed for a bit until the staff finish the morning meeting, at which point there's a short briefing where we're split into teams for the day and assigned various tasks (tracking, gill-netting, GPS mapping, etc). Most days we're out on the boats all day so we pack lunch and gather the gear in the lab and then load up the boats. Generally speaking we work until dinner, which is usually around 6 or 6:30. 

Before arriving here I was basically expecting to eat like a refugee for the next couple months, but i was gratefully mistaken.  Emily, one of the lab managers, happens to be a pretty badass cook and i have yet to have a repeat dinner (chix parm, lasagna, enchilada's, conch fritters, chili, etc).

After dinner we're free to do whatever.  Besides the lab, there's really not much to do on the island after dinner except go to the bar and drink, so when we're not there we hang around the lab and watch movies, play cards, and have conversations about really random shit.  Today, Sean brought back a large stone crab and we got it to crack a bunch of ice cubes with its massive claw.  Sean then proceeded to rip its claw off to eat tomorrow (it's legal to harvest stone crab claws, they grow back), which was pretty funny because he did it right in front of quiet little British Louise, who we then found out did her Masters on the fighting behaviors of crabs.  Playing Pictionary with foreigners (not sure if that's PC) is pretty damn funny but probably a really good way for them to practice english.  

One last note, its only been two weeks and already the girls are routinely burping and talking about farting and periods...I'm probably going to kill myself before this is over.