Reinforcements arrive!

March 2^nd was a big day, this was when our two new team members, Oliver Azevedo, and Alexa Fernández, were set to fly into the Liberia airport. Oliver Azevedo is a first-year Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech in the EGL group and Alexa Fernández is a Costa Rican native currently working on her Master’s degree at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. Their arrival was great news as we would be able to deploy and recover sites fasters.

This was also great news for me, Luis, and Gabriel as it meant that while Samer and Darcy made the drive to the airport, the three of us got to take the day off! We spent our time relaxing; I had some time to work on the blog and do a few paintings. Samer and Darcy had to pick up a few sites before heading to the airport; both of them made the drive because the addition of two more people meant we would require another truck. At the time we only had one truck and a small SUV (which was essentially useless for reaching some of the remote and treacherous sites we were deploying). This SUV will be returned when Darcy leaves on March 5^th, leaving the group with the ideal scenario of two hardy 4×4 trucks. Once Darcy dropped off Samer at the airport and returned from Liberia, the only task we had to do was replace the batteries at the semi-permanent site, NIC-23. This was done by Darcy and Luis while Gabriel and I waited on the arrival of our new team members. Samer, Alexa, and Oliver arrived at the hotel around 5:30 pm after stopping to recover the former semi-permanent site. Nothing quite like an MT instrument recovery after a plane ride to get your blood pumping! Once they arrived we all headed to dinner. Then in our usual fashion, we headed to the pool shortly after.

The next day, March 3^rd, we moved from our current hotel in the city of Nicoya to the coastal town of Puerto Carrillo near Sámara, where we stayed in the beach house of our gracious field coordinator, Carlos Ramírez. This same day, we hatched a plan motivated by the upcoming departure of the project co-lead, Darcy Cordell. We planned to deploy four sites on the 3^rd to allow for a chill day on the 4^th, complete with a goodbye party before his departure on the 5^th.

As usual, this day did not go as planned. The group of Darcy, Alexa, Gabriel and I only managed to recover the 30-degree downslope site (which had data this time! Yay!).

We then spent the rest of the morning essentially driving around. We hit a lot of walls in terms of getting permission for deployments and finding houses without any owners at home. Luis, Oliver, and Samer managed to secure one deployment much further inland near Nicoya. Afterward, they gathered the luggage from the hotel to make the two-hour drive down to the beach house near Sámara. My team had hit so many dead ends, we decided to reconvene with the other team once they arrived at the beach house. It was around 1 pm and our plan of four deployments was looking absolutely shot, with our running total being one deployment. It was also hot and muggy near the coast, far more humid than inland and we were all feeling like blobs ready for a nap.

This is when permission was miraculously granted for a site only 10 minutes away from the house! After rallying my team in the heat, we headed out. The landowner who met us was so kind and took the time to show us a seep on his property (a location where water is leaching up from the deep subduction plate interface).

This deployment was difficult, very steep, very hot, and lots of walking, but we did it! This was Alexa’s first deployment with us (very exciting)! I sadly did not get any pictures mainly due to the challenging conditions at the site. When we returned home, the other team, which we thought had left to get groceries around the same time we left was still not home. This was peculiar, but we presumed they were just taking their time at the grocery store, or had gone for a walk to explore the town. It was so hot and, when we left to deploy our site, they for sure were not going to be doing any more work that day.

Since the beach is less than a five-minute walk from the house, Darcy and I went swimming! We got absolutely destroyed by some intense waves, the amount of salt water in my sinuses was at an all-time high. Alexa, Darcy and I caught a gorgeous sunset over the Pacific.

After making it back to the house at dusk, Oliver, Samer, and Luis arrived back with word of another deployment! This was monumental! The story we heard was that they went to scout the site but then Luis persuaded them to simply power through and deploy the site right then and there.

We were very surprised given the muggy heat and the fact that the last thing we heard from them was “no way are we deploying another site today!”. Samer claims that it was the deafening roar of cicadas that gave Luis the energy to push through the late afternoon deployment. All in all, this means we had managed to get three out of the four planned sites installed for the day. It wasn’t all a wash after all! To end this surprisingly successful day, we then walked to dinner at a location suggested by Carlos down the road and enjoyed fresh seafood and papanachos (like nachos but with plantains).