July 28 - August 3

Again we were battling the stupid weather while trying to complete ant surveys and on top of it we had a Tropical Storm warning to deal with. The first day of AIAS was Monday but just as we were all about to put out our last tubes the rain made us scrap the day's work. It's so infuriating. There is so much preparation that goes into even a single day and this survey takes THREE. We had a few days of stress where we were close to needing to chose preparing for a possible Tropical Storm Erick over completing our work without having either course of action be guaranteed (the storm was to far away to be sure of where it was going and if we had one more day of the survey get rained out we'd have to redo the entire survey at a later date). Obviously we were instructed to prioritize the storm preparation but we were also told to complete the survey if possible. This meant around 4 days of preparing our survey tools the night before, starting the survey at first light, coming back to secure more of the camp fixtures and organize our gear to be stored if we had to shelter in place and then get back to prepping our sure gear for the next day. Steven had it worse because the office requested that he go to the internet cafe every 5 hrs for a storm update, so he spent many of his hours being frustrated with the crappy connection. In the end Erick missed us completely, the weather pretended like it had never heard of such a things as a hurricane because it was all blue Sky's for the rest of the week and the survey was completed without problem.