"This is as entertaining as watching an orange float downstream" #WALLY

Day 1 at FGCU was about "as entertaining as watching an orange float down stream" (Wally)  because that is basically what we did. On Monday we spent the day on the Imperial river measuring the current speed at several points in the estuary. The class was separated into groups and I was assigned to a canoe (absolutely no problem with this) at the head of the Imperial River. Wally was my partner and we would drop an orange in the water, record the start time and GPS coordinates of the starting point, wait 10 minutes for the orange to travel in the current, and then record the GPS coordinates of the ending point and end time. We repeated this process 9 times to make sure we had accurate data. During our fun of watching an orange float downstream, we also got the chance to watch a manatee swim right up to our canoe and mullet were jumping all around us. I wouldn't say the most "fun" part but the most "gratifying" part of this activity was calculating the three main estuarine forces from all of our data. These forces were the surface slope, horizontal density gradient, and friction from the bottom.