An EGL leaves the nest

The next two days we planned were relatively mild, mainly due to Darcy abandoning us on March 6th. The plan for March 4^th was to knock everything out in the morning so that we could have the time after lunch to prepare for the beach grill dinner which doubled as Darcy’s sendoff party.

We split into two groups which was now needed because now our group of seven has become too large to fit into one car with five seats. This consisted of Group A (Darcy, Anna, Alexa, and Gabriel) and Group B (Samer, Oliver, and Luis). Group A drove out to a beautiful, flat site right next to the beach! Alexa, having tried her hand at electrode burying the day prior, acclimated quickly to the workflow of a deployment.

After Darcy leaves for home, I will resume the responsibility of calibrating and programming the receiver to collect data. This was a little nerve-racking as this trip is my first time handling MT instruments, so I spent this particular deployment reviewing the workflow with Darcy.

This deployment seemed to be going smoothly and we finished the installation in around 50 minutes. However, before leaving a site, we always make sure to check the electrode resistances, and at this site, it’s a good thing we did. Our north electrode line was reading a ground resistance of 175,000 ohms. This was alarming since the normal range is between 100 and 10,000 ohms. When the receiver shows such a large resistance, it essentially means “this instrument is not able to measure anything, so I’m giving you the highest value I can record to tell you something is wrong”. We gave the north electrode a check and sure enough, the connection between the electrode and the 50-meter cable was loose and not working properly. Darcy removed the connectors and directly spliced the 50-meter cable directly to the electrode cable. This resolved the issue and we were on our way after only a brief 15-minute hiccup.

Meanwhile, Group B (Samer, Oliver, and Luis) headed up into the mountains to complete a deployment. The goal of finishing work for the day in the early afternoon was a complete success, and we began to prep for the beach grill-out. Our grill master, Samer, had a feast planned. We would have fresh fish, lobster, steak, grilled vegetables, queso fresca and more. For appetizers, Luis made a spicy tuna fish dip, refried beans, and pico de gallo. I contributed a fruit salad of bananas, fresh mangos, and apples.

Below are photos from the grill out!

I tried my best to rally the troops to go swimming with me. This is the part where I learned more than half of our group was skeptical (aka afraid) of swimming in the ocean! Samer and Darcy were the only ones who listened to my call to action. The others watched from the shore.

Progress update after March 4th

On March 5^th we ate our last group breakfast at Casa Zerimar (shown below). Luis and Gabriel made gallo pinto, a delicious traditional Costa Rican breakfast consisting of rice, beans, and eggs.

We also planned a light schedule as this would be Darcy’s last day with us. We split into different groups compared with yesterday. These would be the groups that we would try to stick with after Darcy’s departure. Group A is me, Oliver, and Luis (with Darcy shadowing us for the day to make sure we have everything under control) and Group B is Samer, Alexa and Gabriel. Group A went to recover one site and change the batteries on the current permanent site (the one with the big tree). The recovery went quickly (like almost every recovery), and we attempted to pick some mangos from this cute mango tree (shown below), but sadly they were still not ripe.

At the permanent site, Darcy, Luis, and I took a stab at climbing the gorgeous tree (shown below). We did this while we ran a 15-minute data test because when we went to replace the battery, we saw that the last two-day run had collected no data! While this was a bummer, we simply swapped the batteries and took some extra precautions to make sure the recording would work this time around.

After finishing up at the permanent site, we headed to meet up with Group B while they finished their deployment. They had scouted and gotten permission for this site all in the same day (this is super lucky). We caught the tail end of the workflow and jumped in to help.

Afterwards we took a quick group photo (shown below) and piled back into the cars to get some ice cream from the Nicoya location of Pops (an ice cream chain in Costa Rica) before bidding farewell to Darcy.