The importance of Sugar

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 the formalities out the way, the real purpose of my stay here got underway. The training course on Nansis began with an introduction to acoustic surveys, they purpose they serve, what methods are used and what the outputs of these surveys are. This is necessary as these are the data that we will be looking at when using Nansis. It was not new information for me but it was very well presented so was interesting. I wish now that Jens-Otto Krakstad had given the training on this aspect of the Durban research cruise training course. He was far more understandable than the person who presented this same information back in July.

I had hoped to eat lunch quickly and nip out of the hotel for a quick walk about but that was not to be. Lunch is a seated and served affair and it took up the entire hour allocated for our break. The restaurant also had to make my something unplanned since lunch consisted of a crab starter and prawns for the main meal. They whipped up some very nice chicken so in the end I was well fed.

The afternoon session was dedicated to the Nansis programme with a description of how it was developed, what changes have been made to the system over time, its current capabilities and where it will be going to in the future. We also started the dreaded installation! There was only enough time in the late afternoon to install the Postgres database and we will install the Nansis interface tomorrow. Jens-Otto did tell me to go ahead and finish the installation if I wanted to but I have so far been unsuccessful. Actually the interface is installed, it is the creation of the servers in Postgres that are the problem - I follow the instructions to the letter but the windows that pop up look nothing like the ones in the instruction manual :-(. I will give it one more go tonight but may have to wait until tomorrow to find out what the issue is. The only thing I can think of is that I am using Windows XP Home rather than XP Professional. Of course it doesn't help that one of the instructions is "Drop the server you have just created" - how the heck do I do that!!!!!! This is computer speak that I do not understand. It is all very frustrating.

I did not set foot out of the hotel today so don't have much in the way of photos to show you but below is one that I took last night out my window of the full moon and the city lights.

Tomorrow the course should consist of some more theory in the morning - trawl and ecosystem surveys - and the afternoon is set aside for completing the installation of Nansis. So until tomorrow evening, when I will have successfully installed Nansis, Cheers. :-)