The end is nigh!

Nemesis

So close to the end now. So close. We really gave Gipper a good load of exercise over the last 10 days or so. The weather has been good, so we took advantage. 7 sites covered, with two or three given a wide radar coverage.

It's funny thinking back to writing my proposed methods. In that, I had devised an amazing plan that

Straightish...

would let me to detect silt layers and allow me to roughly map the extent of these layers. Oh my naive days of thinking a peatland is going to be nice and open and it would be possible to run several parallel and perpendicular lines. Then being able to mark where layers begin and end. What actually happens is you turn up at a site with all this equipment and you run transects in the only places you can! You get to look at what you've recorded at the end of the transect, because if you look at the screen while moving, you fall on your arse and mess up the recording while your field assistant laughs at you. It is also entertaining to think that perfectly straight lines would be possible... Thankfully I was mostly able to get a set of perpendicular transects at each site. And with a bit of fighting through waist high grass and knee deep peat, got some good coverage of two sites. Should get another couple in. Also, one of the bonuses of doing this in the long grass, is that we're kind of making pictures in the grass. Not quite crop circles, but some helicopter tours might think there have been some crazy christian sects taking part in weird wetland rituals.

Graffiti on $30k equipment...

A day or two more work and we're done. The numbers look good enough to me. At the start I would have been happy with 60 sites visited and 5 Gippered. We have 83 visited and should have 9 sites gippered. I think I'll award myself a beer.

Probably in good time too. Working in the open air is great, but there's definitely a bit of the "too much of a good thing" going on. Plus there has been the minor frustration of work getting in the way of all the fun things out here. In theory, hiking for work every day should give you some enjoyment of hiking around in fantastic scenery, but howfing heavy kit all over the place and constantly looking at your feet to see how deep the water is kind of distracts you from that! Never mind though. With our 10 day work epic, we should have left ourselves some free time for rest and relaxation. That would be in the form of biking or hiking...

One of the more challenging sites for GPR. Need a boat.

Toley inspection. Or is it clay?