New house, Surfing, Sharks, and Research

Hey again everybody, just sitting around the house and thought I would post another update on some of the things that I have been doing. We moved into our new place last Tuesday morning! The house is amazing! It is located about a 5 minute walk from a couple of great surf breaks and about a 2 minute walk from a bus stop in a little town called Jan Juc. Jan Juc is right beside Torquay and is a lot like Oak Island where I grew up. It is a small beach town that is fairly quiet during the winter. The surf culture out in the area is great, there are lots of surf shop factory outlets that we can get surf gear for sometimes less than half the price in the states. It is a much better fit for me that Geelong was, especially because of its proximity to great surf spots.
Pretty much ever since we moved in I have been surfing about once a day. I have been getting to bed early pretty much every night so I can wake up at dawn before work or before the weekend crowd to surf a spot called Bird Rock. It is a really nice point break that has nothing but rights. It is an advanced wave over a rocky-bottom that breaks over only a couple feet of water in some places. I love it though because it barrels right by the take off spot and there is usually not too bad of a crowd. After I had been surfing for about 3.5 hours this morning, the coast guard came by in a little boat and warned us of a 5-6 meter shark that was about a half mile down the coast heading our way!!! I’m usually not too worried about sharks when I am surfing, but in this case I was ready to get out of the water. At that size it had to have been a great white!
Andrew and I have been researching cars for sale because the bus system sucks. It takes about an hour and a half just to get back and forth from the university (if we plan the bus stop times perfect) even though it is only about a 20-25 minute drive. We have a car on the line right now that hopefully will work out so we can get to work faster and explore surfing further west along the coast.
Work has been going well. I have started to plan the experiments that I will be doing for my research. This upcoming week I will be getting training on how to coat fibers with conductive polymers using a special machine. After I receive that training I will learn how to use the Atmosphere Plasma Treatment Machine. It looks like most of the initial weeks of my work will consist of familiarizing myself with the chemical and equipment I have to use as well as doing a huge amount of background research on my subject. The topic of my research is basically making textiles like polyester and wool conductive by coating them with conductive polymers. To do so I will put the fabric through atmospheric plasma treatment to increase the number binding sites on the fabric, then trying to get the conductive polymers to better adhere to the surface of the fibers. There are a lot of papers on the subject that lead up to what I am doing. I am basically modifying key parts of the application method and trying to coat a different variety of materials. It looks like by the end of my stay I will have published my own research article on the subject! My article will basically have information and findings that nobody else has ever published. I thought that was pretty cool. Well I think I am going to look at the waves and see if anyone has been brave enough to go out in the water with the great white hanging around. Later!

---

---