Warriorbern on the Move

The last few days have disappeared in a haze of biomass estimates and yield-per-recruit calculations. It has been very challenging to dredge all these equations out of the recesses of my brain and figure out how to use them properly but I found the sessions both stimulating and rewarding. Overall the course has been great and even the stuff that I did know was presented so well that it was no hardship to listen to it over again. Knut pacing behind the 2 delegates from Comoros. On the social front, I have spent quite a few evenings in the company of the 3 Norwegian course presenters at a couple of the local restaurants within walking distance from the hotel. These evenings have been entertaining and I think saved me from death by boredom. The hotel that we are at is in the middle of the Port Louis CBD and it is apparently not too safe to wander around outside at night alone so I was glad to have 3 male companions to walk around with. They were good company as well as g...

Last night I was invited to go out to dinner with the three Norwegians and we went to Chinatown to a nice Chinese restaurant where I had Indian curry! Apparently most restaurants serve a variety of local foods which is great when everyone wants to have different cuisines. The benefit of going to Chinatown as opposed to the waterfront is that the prices are far more reasonable away from the waterfront - sound familiar! The food was good and the company, great. They were also very considerate and very little Norwegian was spoken the whole evening. After dinner, no-one was quite ready to return to the hotel so we ended up at the Keg at the waterfront for Irish coffees. The  four coffees cost almost as much as our entire bill from the Chinese restaurant but they were good. This morning we started on the stock assessment aspect of the course. This is being presented by the latest addition to the Norwegian compliment, Knut Korsbrekke. It was very intense and I had to pay attention...

After a good night's rest I was bright-eyed, bushy tailed and eagerly anticipating the week ahead. Today we learnt how to write SQL script so that we can design our own queries for extracting data from Nansis. Writing scripts is not my favourite activity but I think with a bit of playing around and working with the data, it will all be ok. During the morning another Norwegian arrived. We have not been formally introduced to him yet, this will happen in the morning. He is here to teach us about doing fish stock assessments which will be good but possibly a little tough too. The poor man has arrived without his luggage courtesy of British Airways. Hopefully he will get his bags before he has to leave again! In the afternoon we had a recap session. It was on the three tricky parts of using Nansis - the installation, exploring a new survey and estimating the biomass of individual and groups of species. It was really hot today and I had my first swim in the hotel pool. It is a tin...

This weekend was so busy that there just wasn't enough time to blog so here is the weekend report. On Friday night I went, along with some of the other ladies on course with me, to Mira's house for dinner. It reminded me of how much I love Indian hospitality! Mira is fifth generation Mauritian and very nationalistic but within that has maintained her Indian culture too. We were fed and fed and fed some more. It was all really delicious and a wonderful evening spent chatting about anything and everything. It was also my first encounter with the Mauritian generosity of pouring alcohol. I was given a gin and tonic that was four fingers gin and one finger tonic! This is apparently how they mix there drinks and this was to be reaffirmed on Saturday evening but I will get to that later. It was a very late evening and those of us on the course needed to get some rest as we had class the next morning. Saturday's lessons were about using the data stored in Nansis to investigate th...

Just a quick blog today as I have been invited to dinner, along with all the other women on the course, by one of the ladies from the Albion Fisheries Research Centre and there is not much time to blog before going to her house. You may think that may be a lot of people but we are only 6 women in total. Today we did exercises using Nansis to estimate fish biomass from acoustic trawls and fish density estimates using bottom trawl surveys. It was really fun, well for me, since it involves drawing on maps which I enjoy a lot. :-) This just shows the area and trawls used to estimate density of a single species of fish off West Africa. Everyone seems to be in need of a break, it has been a very intense week so far. At least we only have half a day of work tomorrow and then ... IT'S THE WEEKEND BABY!!!!!

After writing the blog last night, I decided that I should do a bit of laundry ... oh boy, I am so not cut out for hand washing clothes! There was water every where by the time I was finished. It also didn't help that there really isn't anywhere to hang anything so more water was added to the floor from the dripping clothes. Initially I thought the water on the floor wouldn't be a problem because there is a drain hole in one corner but the floor doesn't slope towards it so all the water pooled on the other side of the bathroom. Hope it didn't leak into the bathroom below mine. Actually it would serve that guy right because this morning he flicked a match out of his window which got caught in an up draught and landed in my room. Luckily it was no longer burning! Another funny thing this morning was that I had no sooner got out the shower when there was a knock at my door ... the maintenance guy just wanted to check if I had hot water HUH!!!! Was he lurking around i...

Our course is structured so that we have lectures in the morning and practical sessions in the afternoon. This is probably a good idea because then there are no sleepers in the room after the three course lunch that we get every day. This morning's theory was about research surveys using trawl nets. It was presented by Tore Strømme who is the Research Coordinator for the EAF Nansen Project which looks after the research vessel Dr Fridtjof Nansen. His presentation was very comprehensive starting with some background on the previous cruises conducted by the old research vessel (of the same name) and the current vessel. This included an explanation on how the EAF Nansen Project focus has changed over the years from the single species stock assessments to the current methods of undertaking ecosystem approaches to surveys ... hope you have not dropped off to sleep! Once we had all the info on how the ship operates, he started in on trawl surveys proper. This covered a huge range of info...

The course was officially opened this morning by the Acting Permanent Secretary, Mr Gondeea. The Fisheries Minister was supposed to do the honours but he blew us off to go officiate (well at least that's what I hope he was doing) at the last export of bulk sugar from Mauritius. From after this morning, all sugar will be exported pre-packaged - not sure what the significance is of this but there you go, something you didn't think you needed to know LOL. Does "Acting Permanent" sound like a contradiction in terms to anyone else? So here is Mr Gondeea addressing us. After all the formalities I was able to have a quick meeting with Mr Gondeea to discuss the inclusion of the Mauritian fisheries in the WIOFish database (the project I coordinate). They are very keen to be part of the project but it needs to go before parliament for government approval. This will happen next week so I should have a definite answer from them before I leave Mauritius next week. With all t...

This morning I was awakened by a very rude mynah bird sitting on my windowsill and squawking for all the world to hear. It was so loud I initially thought it had snuck into my room and was perched on my pillow. Thankfully it gave up after a while and flew off but my after that rude awakening there was no going back to sleep. Breakfast was a really good healthy meal, lots of fruit (with paw paw Mother) and cereal. I had a bit of deja vu to the trip I did to Egypt with my cousin when the restaurant manager brought me flowers at my table although in Egypt the flowers were given on the last morning of our stay and not on the first morning! So here is a picture of the flowers I got today. As I said yesterday, our course was due to start in the afternoon so I went for a walk around the neighbourhood after breakfast. Port Louis is really interesting. It is a complete mish mash of architecture with very old buildings right up against modern glass structures. I followed a map in a guide boo...

I am finally out of my office again and am spending the next 2 weeks in Mauritius. I am here to attend a course on a software system called Nansis which is used aboard the Norwegian research vessel called the RV Dr Fridtjof Nansen and which is being used in one of the projects I work on. The Durban to Johannesburg flight was uneventful but for those of you who were with me at 7 Squadron, the Captain was none other than Angel - Russell Angus. I had a brief flash of that Imp that he threw away at Langebaan but then decided to forget about that! Johannesburg to Mauritius was also an ok flight. When we landed though we were not allowed to disembark for ages and the pilot told us that this was because they had problems with the No 2 engine and the only way for it to be checked out was to leave it running while the ground crew inspected it. Needless to say there was much nervous giggling from the passengers and a lot of relief that the pilot only mentioned it when we were safely...