Daily life at MCP

I have time to write this first part of the weblog, because the electrician had just cut the power which means I finally have time to write. It has been a busy time the last month with working days from 7h30 till 18h30, but we are functioning more and more as we have envisioned Marine Conservation Philippines to be and that is nice.

Of course there are ups and downs. Car problems arise on a regular basis and then there are the small funny problems. It turns out that in our house the lights are a bit weird. The porch light is permanently on, unless we cut all the power in our house and the switch for the porch light is an actual master switch with with you can turn on and off all the lights in our house. By the time it is fixed it is two weeks later, but look on the bright side, at least we always have light.

We are getting more and more in an organized daily rhythm, because the cars do not break down that often any more and we are getting more volunteers which means we have to start to work in a structured way. Our daily program is two dives in the morning, which takes actually the whole morning and part of the afternoon depending on where we dive and have lunch between 13h00 and 14h30.

The afternoon is used for presentations (learning different fish species, what MCP is about), data entry, watching a nature documentary or practical work on the base which ranges from making hammocks to design a fireplace, make a recycling system for waste or making concrete weights for the gym (unbelievable, I cannot even lift them 1 cm from the ground but that's just me).

The cook prepares really nice food, Filipino but also international. We even had sushi last week! We work from Monday to Friday, on Saturday we have a fun dive and Saturday afternoon and the complete Sunday we have weekend. Each Saturday evening we have a BBQ. So far we have not been doing overmuch during our Sundays. It is very nice to lie in Dolf's homemade hammock of fishing net and just read a book. Sometimes we go to Dumaguete, or just visit a restaurant and have a nice western meal for lunch.

There are a lot of small things that still need to happen, but for the coming months we have two workers permanently on the base who are making bamboo furniture, make small adjustments to the cabins and do a lot of other stuff. Each week we see the improvements. Not as fast anymore as in the beginning of course, because the other 25 workers are back to fishing again.

Researchwise we are now focusing on fish on species level on each dive site. Since there are 2000 different fish species in the Philippines, we only pay attention on the butterflyfish and angelfish for now. That is already a challenge, because it turns out we have 31 species of butterflyfish. By now, Dolf and me can recognize them all, but it is a challenge for new volunteers because some of them do not even know what a butterflyfish is to begin with.

But we designed a teaching system in which they learn a few new species each day on land through a powerpoint presentation, and we point them out underwater. After a few days they are able to do a test both above water and underwater and if they pass they can join in on the research.

We are now trying to analyze the first data, but that takes a while because our statistical skills are a bit rusty and of course we have to use an open source statistical program which works way different compares to the program we used in university. But with a good free online manual it's just a question of time before we can say something useful about our first results.

Since the weblogs are not that regular anymore, I advise people who want to have more info on a regular basis to have a look at the Marine Conservation Philippines facebookpage or like it. We upload pictures every once in a while as well as marine information (both semi-scientific or just newspaper articles as well as nice pictures about diving).

It is more fun in Zamboanguita

I wrote this weblog for the MCP site, but forgot to post it on our weblog. By now it is three weeks later, but the info is still correct.
We rephrase the national slogan of the Philippines which is used everywhere: it's more fun in the Philippines. The last two weeks we have been working together with our first three volunteers, hurray! At the moment we have a rescue course and we continue with data collection for our marine biology research, while we are exploring new dive sites in the meantime.
By now we have discovered some very suitable dive locations which can be used both for courses and research. We also had a look at the other site of the hill were we are living. From some lookout points we have a view on Tambobo bay in neighbouring Siaton, a nice small natural bay, which makes a perfect harbor.
After some climbing on rocks to enter the water, we discovered that if we had walked another 100 meters we would have had an easy beach access.  The coral looks very diverse and you can dive on a continuous reef for an hour. It seems we have found our perfect fun diving area with a white beach with palm trees nearby to relax afterwards. Palm trees remain dangerous at all times though. We had to wait a few minutes before we could enter with our car because people were harvesting coconuts. This  means that two guys climb into the trees and start dropping coconuts. You do want to wait because a coconut makes a nice dent in your car. One of the first things you learn here as a driver is to watch out for coconut palms when you park. Make sure your car is not under it!

One of the more difficult dive sites to reach with a car has now been explored as well. The first time we got stuck with our Kia Bongo in a bamboo fence. The road was very narrow and we thought we could just squeeze trough... Apparently not, because we didn't take into account that the fence wasn't actually straight. The lower part was bent outwards and one of the bamboo poles got stuck at the side of the car. Because a palm tree blocked our way out at the other site we had to maneuver back and forth with the bamboo scratching and scratching against the car. Eventually we got loose and now we have a big dent at the side of the car. We couldn't turn so we had to go to the dive site. The designated parking place was on the beach, were the car got stuck in the sand and we had to pull it out. Grumphh.
Today we returned to the same place but a 100 m to the south. This road to the beach was a much better option, even for people with limited driving skills in a big car since we managed to reach the dive site without car injuries. The dive was very very nice. The dive site is part of an MPA which has been enforced since 2009 and that shows in the size and occurrence of the fish. A lot of (big) groupers, parrotfish, sweetlips, a lot of snapper species and a lot of adult fish in general.

We have started with some pilot studies to figure out on which fish species we need to focus later. We started with looking at abundance of fish at family level in all the different dive sites, but it turned out that that idea was a bit too general. Most families occur at most dive sites. So we have gone down to species level. Since it is impossible to identify a lot of species at the same time, we are now focusing on butterflyfish and angelfish. Then you definitely see a difference between dive sites. In the meantime we learn a lot of new species as well. We take a camera with us on each dive and make pictures of a lot of fish. That is very useful. We thought we saw about 5 different species of snappers, but after identifying some pictures it seems we have about 9 species. If we discover a species and we have no clue what is it, even after flipping through several fish books, there is always id please, a facebook page were you post your picture and some additional data. Within 30 minutes you get a response of somebody who knows much more than us and that is usually correct.  Hopefully we increase our knowledge to an extent that instead of only posting pictures we are actually able to id pictures of others.

In the meantime construction work on the project site is going fast. The third hut for volunteers is almost ready, one of the staff huts is finished and the other will be done (hopefully) soon as well. The common area is looking better each day and the storage room in the kitchen is not a sleeping room anymore but can actually be used for groceries. The stupid mistakes workers sometimes make we take for granted (why cement and even paint a wall if the pipes for the water still need to be in the wall and make exactly the same mistake at the second hut... or why does it takes 3 efforts in 5 days to cement a bed at the right size so the mattress actually fits), because usually they are working really hard and do a good job. It all takes a bit longer, but in the end we will be having an awesome project site.