Hello, I’m Cate, and I’ll be writing the blog for the next couple weeks.  I’m from Boston and go to Nobles, just outside the city.  Recently, I and many other students have been missing fall, but it was great to get a feel for that these past few days.  The temperatures dropped after the hurricane, and a lot of leaves were lost, so we are getting our “fall” down here at The Island School.  To add to the feeling, we celebrated Halloween on Thursday night with a costume contest.  Some of my favorites were teacher impersonations, the Island School “pets”, as well as a throwback to my favorite childhood TV show, Rocket Power.  Thursday night was also the first we were all back together after the hurricane.  K3 returned from Down Island, and K4 from kayak; it is great to be reunited and together again for the rest of the semester! For the students on academic rotations, Thursday was our all-day Research day.  Most groups did not go out in the morning, but we were all able to go out by the afternoon.  My research group, Climate Change, went out with the Bonefish group and after what seemed to be an unsuccessful afternoon, we were able to catch about fifteen bonefish right before we were about to leave!  Friday was our day off, and we spent some time preparing for the haunted house we are putting on for our DCMS buddies tonight.  Everyone is excited for the haunted house, and hope we can pull everything off and live up to last year’s!

Campus has begun to quiet down again, as K2 and K3 have left again to finish the remainder of their wilderness trips. Run and swim track begin again today, training for our super swims and half marathons. The twenty four of us who are still on campus have continued with our academic rotation and are now nearing the end. It was an interesting experience to have classes with just so few of us. Yet, the lack of people was made up for by even more exciting classes. Today I experienced my second to last Human Ecology rotation. Meaning that every other morning block so far has been an elongated human ecology class. Each of these stud different topics, such as Permaculture, Aquaculture, Aquaponics, and energy. I was luck enough to have Aquaponics on the day where there was a Tilapia harvest. I spent a large portion of the morning about shoulder deep in the Tilapia tank, which has about 300 fish, catching as many as I could with a net. It turned out to be one of the best mornings I have had here so far, especially after we got to fillet the fish and make some pre-lunch fish tacos.

Some of us have been going the smallest bit stir crazy, as we were not allowed to leave campus for several days because of the high winds, waves, and storms. Our biggest excitement was going to high rock that week, one place we were allowed to go with a faculty member. Driving up everything seemed average, but after walking out from behind a turn onto to rocky coast everything was wild. [slideshow]Huge waves surged out in the sound, some of them surging into the rocks of high rock and creating a fifteen foot high wave of water that splashed everywhere. That combined with the powerful wind made for an incredible experience. Continue reading →