I"m on a boat!

We are well underway with sampling in Lake Tanganyika. We picked up our guide, Mupape, at the train station on Sunday - be thankful you most likely will never take the train across Tanzania. After nearly 2 days of travel, hordes of passengers disembarked from the train, all carrying luggage and suitcases on their heads, a feat I will likely never achieve. There is also zero order when it comes to finding taxis, buses, etc to leave the station - apparently honking your horn repeatedly makes things that much better.

We starting out on the lake on Monday of this week to test out our GPS and sampling equipment. Most of that time was wrought with seasickness, but I was able to not feed any fish. We are recording sonar images of the lake bottom across several transects and are sampling sediment and water at 5, 10, 15, 30, and 40 m water depth along various transects perpendicular to the shore line. So far things are going pretty well...we have only lost 1 item over the side of the boat so far, within the Luiche River, which drains into the lake. No one was eager to retrieve it, even though it was likely on 10' deep, due to the threat of crocodiles. As far as other wildlife go, we have only seen a few monkeys, in addition to your standard birds. I will likely get to visit Gombe National Park on Sunday to (hopefully) see the chimpanzees!

Hope all is going well back home.

Usiku mwema (good night).

Pictures (from top to bottom):

1) The road leading up to the hotel.

2) Sailboats on Lake Tanganyika

3) Working with the GPS/Sonar unit