It’s been a long winter!

It’s been a very long winter and we are all ready to begin field work. We have spent the winter renovating offices, constructing a new seagrass lab and re-organizing and cleaning out the greenhouse. Now it’s time to get back in the water.

Last Friday marks the first dive of the season for the crew as Kim and Barry went out to check on one of our test planting sites at 67 Steps in Southold, Long Island Sound. The day was unseasonably warm; a perfect day for the first dive of the season. Fortunately, the plants looked great there. Some early season camera issues didn’t allow for pictures of all of the patches, but Kim reported that everything she saw looked really good.

I hope these observations are a sign of things to come as we launch our spring monitoring visits to all of our sites. After a winter like the one we just had, I have concerns over whether or not everything survived; only time will tell whether we had any losses.

For the next week we have to limit our observations to shore dives until the boats are back in the water in early April. Once our boats are back in, we can check on our sites out at Plum and Great Gull Island as well as scout out new spring test planting sites.

Finally, we also need to get into Shinnecock Bay and check on the status of a large-scale seeding effort and experiment that we began last summer. The results of this project could be very exciting…

Check back for more observations in the coming weeks.

-ChrisP