We start our days at 7.30 am with having breakfast together and trying to wake up properly, talking about the weird dreams we had last night. Then everyone has to get sorted and ready to work by 8.30 am so we can have a successful and productive day. We have a whiteboard where the team leaders put up the tasks for that day for each person.
Depending on our meal plans, there is always a pair on making lunch, and a pair on cleaning lunch dishes the same thing goes for dinner, unless we are going out to a restaurant or to the market. Food in restaurants and especially at the market is so cheap in Phuket that is just as much worth to go out as it is to stay in and cook. It mostly depends on what kind of mood are we in, it is nice to cook together and learn new recipes from each other, but it is also great to experience the unique dishes of Thailand and try to keep a straight face while eating the very spicy ones.
Melanie who’s in charge of the shark population project arranges 2-3 interviews for most days that is how she collects data for her project. Other days are spent scouting locations for landing sites and markets. She always takes 2 people with her to take notes as well, so she won’t miss anything the participant says an interview is about 30 minutes long. With the divers they usually meet at the pier, but for market sellers and fisherman the location differs. When they come back they need to unite their notes and type them up this usually takes them about 35 minutes per interview. After that comes the coding of the interviews. To get data from a proper landing site, Melanie and two other team members will have to travel to Ranong where they will conduct more interviews with the market sellers with the help of a translator.
We usually eat lunch around 1pm and then back to work at 2pm. The rest of the team who didn’t go with Melanie, organise activities for the upcoming weeks, such as a school visit or a beach clean. Others might be writing blogposts about the events of the past few days or analysing data from the fish or the coral projects. For the coral project we use a program called CPC (Coral Point Count) that helps analyse the coral coverage of different dive sites. Some people use this time to fill in their logbooks for diving or to work on their drafts for the preliminary report of the expedition. Every few days we need to make a new meal plan and go shopping to get all the ingredients and other essentials for the house. As tap water in Thailand is not suitable for consumption, we always need to be sure we have enough full water drums in the house, as due to the heat everyone needs to hydrate properly to avoid heat strokes.
Our working time usually ends at 5pm depending on how much of the planned things we’ve got done during the day. Dinner is at 7pm and after that there’s usually some sort of a team activity, such as movie nights, or enjoying a game of pool.
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