by Caciques Brandon Gell and Sarah Francisco
*Morning exercise
Freediving in a tunnel
It changed my life*
*Went to Schooner Cays
Celestial navigation
Looked at the sun* Continue reading
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Cacique Update October 30, 2010
“Boo!”
By Caciques Perry Leavitt and Liam Donovan
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Although it is not quite Halloween, The Island School celebrated the amazing holiday today. Tonight was our haunted house. We decorated the campus so that we could scare all of the Deep Creek Middle School students. The boathouse was haunted by four dead scuba divers. Liam was lying face down in the freshwater dunk tank ready scare all of the children. The dinning hall deck was a Continue reading
Cacique Update October 29, 2010
“Ghost Town”
by Caciques Chris Pibl and Catharine Pirie
Campus has been a ghost town for the past few days. While some groups left for 8 day kayak, others were leaving for Down Island Trip, leaving the teachers alone on campus. K2 returned from their kayak trip yesterday so they were the only ones on campus until they were joined later on in the day with the arrival of K1 and K4 from their Down Island Trip. Last night, we almost had a full community, with the exception of K3, and we are sad to see K4 leave again for their kayak trip. K1 and K2 have been busy preparing for their academic week.
Having just returned from their kayak, k2 has many stories to tell about kayak. Continue reading
Godspeed K3!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKox1IR419s
Halfway through the eight day kayak trip and down island trip rotation, the K3 kayak group departed this morning from Cow Point, Eleuthera. They will be spending four days on the water before embarking on a two-day solo experience. The K1 group finished their trip on Monday and headed down island this morning along with the K4 group. Kayakers in the K2 group were resupplied on Monday and will return to The Island School on Thursday evening.
Cacique Update October 25, 2010
“K1 Returns!”
By Caciques Clay Bales and Aly Boyce
Today started off with much anticipation for our K1 kayak group returning. We had classes all morning and a two-hour block for our human ecology presentations. We all enjoyed learning about bio-diesel, compost, bees and conscious consumerism, as the presentations were very interesting and informative. We had art all afternoon to finish our Unit 3 projects, which we will put in the parents weekend art gallery. Those who finished early had an optional Querencia time, to prepare us for the 48-hours of solo ahead. At circle Clay Bales, Will Overman and Augie Cummings performed the song “I and Love and You” by the Avett Brothers. Continue reading
Cacique Update October 24, 2010
By Caciques Sarah Sasek and George Giannos
This morning’s exercise was a salsa class on top of the dining hall deck. Do not be mistaken—it was exercise. The rising sun’s rays illuminated the clouds lining them with a soft pink, as twenty-four awkward students, plus faculty, shook their hips and stumbled upon their feet. Perhaps a few exceptions were the dance instructors Aubrey and Matt, along with some other students and faculty who are blessed with rhythm, unlike me.
Shortly afterwards, we departed on the bus for Princess Cays. Our objective for today: to observe tourism and to determine whether or not we consider ourselves tourists. As we drove up a hill we could see over the trees and caught a glimpse of the ocean with a massive ship sitting on its horizon. It seemed out of place. Here, the tourists relax for a day before returning to sea. Abruptly, I realized just how removed from American society I have been for nearly two months, but what shocked me more was realizing just how removed from Bahamian society the tourists were, despite being in The Bahamas. Continue reading
Satellite tag pops off!
The deep water shark team is excited to announce that the first of 3 satellite tags has popped off a Bluntnose sixgill shark! The shark was tagged with an X-tag supplied by Lucy Howie-Jordan of Microwave Telemetry Inc. on September 13th 2010 and set to record the shark’s movements for 30 days. The tag popped off, as programmed, on October 14th 2010. Once reaching the surface the tag began to slowly transmit the stored location, depth and temperature data and we are anticipating full recovery of the data. It’s exciting to see that the shark was tagged just off Cape Eleuthera and popped off at the Southern tip of Eleuthera just offshore from Lighthouse beach! On the image below you can see the track that the floating satellite tag took via surface currents. We hope it continues to Continue reading
Research? In the middle of the night?!
This week has been an eventful week for the Deep Water Sharks team. We said goodbye to three members of our team while they went off on their kayak trip. However we still have been working hard, out surveying two times this week, one of which was late Friday night. We stayed up as late as we ever have this semester and, as teenagers who are busy and need our sleep, there were some yawns.
Even so we had an awesome time. Aly went to set the survey with Annabelle and Sean, then Sean and Aubrey joined to retrieve the survey at 11pm. Though we have only caught two sharks this week, they are two types of sharks that we are looking for to conduct further research.
We are focusing on the Gulper and the Taiwan Gulper. Friday afternoon we caught a Gulper, but unfortunately we were not able to put a satellite tag on it to track its movements. Friday night, however, we caught the Taiwan Gulper, which is the larger of the two sharks and this one was 152 centimeters long. We took blood, a DNA sample, and placed a satellite tag on the shark.
The tag will track the shark for 30 days then pop off and transmit all the data it has stored on the sharks movements to a satellite. Currently we are working on our final presentations/scientific papers. Individually we wrote our introductions, but now in our academic rotations for kayak, the three of us are working as a team on our methods section here on campus.
Clay, Aly and Aubrey
Patchin’ it Up – Wet Suit Style
[slideshow]
As the water dropped to a frigid 25° Celsius (77° Farhenheit), we ripped the wet suits out of the closets. No more monkey business, it’s gettin’ cold. Feel warm and buoyant, the accuracy of our abundance surveys greatly increased. At our second site, we were meet with a staggering amount of our key species; 11 Nassau grouper, 8 Spiny lobster, 5 Red lionship, and 1 Queen triggerfish who was playing dead. After some lengthy calculations, we determined that the population of marine species at this patch reef was greater than that of the entire Cape Eleuthera marina. Too bad we didn’t have enough time to check it out.
After an extensive photo shoot modeling our wet suits, we concluded we were eternally acclimatized to the Bahamian waters. BEST DAY EVER!
Cacique Update October 23, 2010
“The Last Tamarind Cups”
By Caciques Daisy Spencer and Tucker Beckett
Well, If you’re going to wake up and go someplace right away, it might as well be one of the most beautiful beaches in the world: lighthouse Beach. After an abbreviated circle, we both ate very quick breakfasts and ran to the van with all of our archaeology gear. Since we were both Caciques and dish crew, we had to find people to sub for us on both while we were gone, which was not easy, especially in that short time. It was a weird coincidence that we both happened to be on the archaeology team. Anyway, after an hour long van ride over backroads, which shouldn’t even be considered roads at all, we went to work and started digging holes for the day. Digging for 2 hours wiped us out, so on the way back, Justin S. picked us up some jerk chicken and ribs… it woke us right up. Continue reading