Day 5: July 9, 2012

Woke up early to get to Richie. I was having trouble with my ankle for some reason, so I tried to lighten my load by not packing my Helly Hansen rain gear.

Worst decision ever. I'm never going to make the mistake of thinking that the weather looks nice in the morning, so it will be nice in the afternoon. By the time we got to the lake, it looked like rain. Worse rain than yesterday. We decided to hunker down and wait it out, so I put on a plastic poncho and waited for the storm to hit.

And hit it did.

It rained really hard for almost two hours. The thunder was so loud, and I swear there was some lightning right over the lake. It was awesome (I think that lightning is super cool), but also a bit scary. The rain was really cold too. My poncho didn't keep me warm like my Helly Hansen coat did on the canoe to Moskey, so I sat there shivering, getting rain in my not so protective plastic. Not a comfortable experience. From now on, that coat is going to be in my backpack wherever I go.

Eventually, we were able to sample the west side of the lake. We did the close cove, then started swimming to the far one when it started clouding over again. (Seriously, weather?!? Give us a break if you could.) So we climbed out of the water to wait again. Let me tell you, it's cold sitting out of water in a wet wetsuit. It didn't end up ever storming- I guess it just blew to the side of us, but better safe than sorry!

One of the important parts of our research is doing transects within the lakes. To do that, we attach one end of a pre-marked floating rope to something on shore (a rock or branch), pull it straight out into the water, and keep it in place at the other end with an anchor and a small buoy. Angela brings a 0.4m² quadrat (a square made from PVC pipe) to the 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, and 50 meter marks, and we record the plant species that are present in each spot at the surface and below the water. This gives some sort of a picture of the diversity within each lake. Sometimes it gets too deep or dark too quickly, and we can't do all 50 meters of our transect, but we always go as far as we can!

Branches or fallen logs work well as an anchor, as long as they're firmly in place.

You can see the transect rope going out into the center of the lake!

Every ten meters, the rope changes color, and every five, there's a knot in the rope, so that we can easily tell where we are in the transect.

The quadrat floats, which makes it easy to see which species emerge from the surface of the water, and how many stems of each species there are.

When held underwater, Angela can identify the species present underwater, and their relative percentage of abundance!

Angela's fashionable Potamogeton necklace. :)

So we sampled the far cove of west Richie, and then got to do an extra transect off of one of the islands in the middle of the lake. We finished sampling around 6, changed back into clothes from our wetsuit, deflated the boat, and hiked back!