How to spend your Sunday in a useful way...

Marcello from Coza Nova awaits us with splendid portuguese espresso coffee. It is Sunday, 8:15 h in the morning, and we've just picked up Samuel at his Barra Resort room. We are sitting on the terrace of Marcello's lunchroom looking over the Ria de Aveiro. Samuel had to wake up some of his fellow students, which they did not really appreciate, but we were not sure if they wanted to join in today's mission impossible. Caroline says she will join us a bit later and the rest of the students remain blissfully ignorant of our early morning activities.

We finish the coffee, a few pastel de natas and a kroket, and embark on our mission. It is a beautiful day and portuguese families flock to Barra and Costa Nova to enjoy a nice day at the beach. Our mission is different though. We will take our ugly boat and aim to install a piezometer on the small island in the Ria de Aveiro estuary, down to a depth of 8 m below the surface. Samuel is sure that this can easily be done.

While we see people arriving on the island for leisure, we are bailing sand out of an a PVC casing. At 5 m depth, gravel starts to interfere with our bailing making it hard to continue because the thing gets stuck in the casing all the time. An hour and a lot of sweat later, Samuel is ready to give up his 8 m depth goal...

The students fix minifilters on the piezometer to allow sampling of water at different depths for chemical analysis. Then we put the piezometer/minifilter system in the casing...

This is always the moment of truth: can we get the casing out because. You should realise that there's a lot of friction between the sand and 7 m of casing. This time things prove really hard. The upper casing breaks when we turn the contraption to get it out and we have to break our backs working in the sand. After several worried moments, we decide to use the broken part to try to lift the casing and that works!

We sample some water, see that it is a changing mixture of fresh and salt water with depth. We succeeded, but it has been a long day as we are back on shore only at 18:15 h and feel exhausted. I am really proud of all our hydrology students, their motivation and attitude is great and they hardly ever complain, even under difficult conditions. So we end our Sunday sitting at a terrace in our dirty clothes eating large, well deserved, icecreams. Life's not so bad...