The Three- Hour Tour

In my youth, whenever I would go on a boat tour with my father, he would start singing the theme song to “Gulligan’s Island”.  The other day, my assistants and I went on a little Three-Hour Tour… and sure enough the theme song to Gilligan’s Island was in my head when we started.  It all began innocently enough, I was feeling like I didn’t have enough work to do with starting two research sites (why only work 14 hours a day, when you can work 18), that I figured I should check out a possible third site. The good news was that I could use my own boat to get to and explore the new site; the bad news was that we had to go out to sea to access the third river.  We arrived at the new river safely without any problems; after finding five proboscis monkey groups and buying some fresh fish at a boat thru fish shop (shop is a very generous word, basically a guy standing next to a cooler on a dock), we decided to head home.  As we approached the sea, I realized that this was not going to be a boat ride on smooth seas. I quickly wrapped all expensive electronic equipment into their various dry bags and boxes, tied everything down, and prepared for the ride.  We entered the sea, and when the first wave came over the edge of the boat…. I thought “Oh that wasn’t that bad”.  Then the second one came and smacked me in the face.  “Hmmm, sea water, good for the skin”.  As we headed out to sea, the waves started getting bigger and bigger, till the swells were about 3 to 5 feet.  Then just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, the winds started to pick up, the sky turned an eerie shade of dark grey, and it started to pour.  There is wet, and then there is really wet, we had passed the point of being really wet, as my entire body had already started to prune.  As my teeth began to chatter, and I started thinking about how I could use my dry bags as floatation devices (shhhh don’t tell my mom, but I didn’t have my life jacket with me), my assistants (who don’t know how to swim) decided that maybe it was time to turn back.  As we arrived back to the town of exploration, the people we bought the fish from were laughing when a very water logged American got off the little boat.  Now you would think the story ends there… but the American can’t sit under an awning of a building in the pouring rain.  One of my assistants found a motorcycle to borrow, to transport me back to our house.  Funny thing is that now he insisted that I put on my poncho (had the poncho the whole time, but it was covering my equipment), and I prayed that the end of this adventure was not going to end in a motorcycle crash (since my helmet was sitting at home with my life jacket).   Eight hours of wearing my polar fleece, wool socks, and skiing liner gloves, I finally shopped shivering... and you all laughed at me when I packed that stuff to live at 1 degree south of the equator.  Needless to say, I might be sticking to only two sites.