Hapuna Beach

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Today we were up and out of the house by 8:45 to head over to Chris' house. Once we completed the 3 minute drive over there, we listened to humpback whales greatest hits, the recordings of singing humpback whales that we recorded on the Hilo side. We listened to the different verses and themes of the songs. After that we took the pictures that we took last week on the Hilo side and compared them with pictures from our Alaskan Humpback whale catalog, and also Chris' Hawaii catalog. Saulina and Nia were working on the Hawaii catalog and they found a match, and Tash and Mary were working on the Alaskan catalog and they also found a match! When we couldn't find any more matches we were saved by the arrival of Trisann. She brought over malasadas. Malasadas are like a square doughnut with sugar sprinkled on top. We went back to house for lunch and Trisann told us about her study with sea-turtles and her senior thesis project. After about an hour, we headed over to the shore station. At the shore station, Nia and Saulina took notes. When you're taking notes you have to record the time of the scan, the environment conditions, all the vessels seen and their postion. You also have to record the pods of humpback whales, their location, whether or not they are surface active, how many whales there are, and the type of whale it is, such as a mother and calf. They also had to record the time of the binocular fix. A binocular fix is when the whale is first sighted by the observer, who is Chris. Mary and Tasha controlled the computer. It's basically like taking notes, except coldes are used. The computer is connected to the theodolite. The theodolite is like a binocular that takes positions of the whales or vessels. The computer then records the postion with the notes taken. Yin is the only person that works the theodolite. After we were all done with the shore station, we went back to the house to get ready for our last trip to the beach. We went to Hapuna beach. We stayed for about 3 hours. While we were there we sunbathed, went boogie-boarding, body surfing, swimming, and had a picnic for dinner. After the sunset, it was time to go home. We did homework for about and hour and started to get our things together for tomorrow is our last day =(

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