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...

Meteorology and the water balance

Part of our field course is to try to make a water balance of the catchment area. This basically means that we look at how much water gets into our area with rainfall, and balance this against the amounts of water leaving our area through evaporation, groundwater outflow and river outflow. The previous days our attention had been on installation of the rainfall and river discharge stations and now it was time to start with measurements of evaporation. This is done by setting up a micrometeorological station at a conveniently located site near Covao do Lobo where lunch is served first. The image above gives an impression of the site selection and the large role in this process of the mental coach.

When the team of students that will report on the water balance has found an appropriate location the meteorological instruments are mounted on a tower, the tower is erected and the logger is connected to the wire spaghetti and switched on. This usually takes a few hours and the whole contraption should then be running at sunset. This year, again, we lost our piezometer for measuring groundwater level changes as the field had been plowed. So we have to return here soon and install a new one...

Installation day, now it's getting serious

Student's all arrived safely at their "beach resort" in Praia de Barra, did their dirty laundry and went on to do some reconnaissance in the Vagos area where they have their five catchments. As their supervisors we went to the garage and prepared 5 instrument kits, for each group equipment including water level sensors, wading suit (too hot to use so remains in back of rental car all the time), boxes, hardware, tipping bucket rain gauges, chemistry kits, pH and EC meters, etc., etc. It was a hot day in that garage but we discovered that we had everything with us. Me "very happy" and compliments to Michel Groen and Frans Backer who again did a great job at the VU University getting everything together!!!

That is all behind us and today we had appointments with all five groups to meet in Montouro - at Café Veneluso, our favourite water hole in the study area - to distribute their instrument sets. There we had coffee, followed by a frantic exchange of stuff from our big van to the small rental cars.

Then went on to do the installation of the discharge measurement stations and (automatic) rainfall stations. You propably never did something crazy like this but it is good to know that this involves:

• Selecting a site (often wading through thorny bushes and garbage),


• hammering away on a steel pipe with mosquitos attacking you by some of the less fortunate groups that have a catchment that has not been studied before, or where staff gauges had dissapeared upon our return,




• Getting the dataloggers in place and programming them,




• Happy moments when finished...





• And of course some people prefer to do hydrochemistry while sitting on a dirt road near a dead, somewhat smelly snake.

It is late, tomorrow more about the meteorological tower installation and a copulent lunch at Sesta!

Proves of the hard work

While Maarten and Vincent are doing a lot of work for us, we decided to relaxed for a while at the beach of Barra, still recovering from Henk and Richards booth camp. Although we have participated in a biking experience we really did some work and we have learned a lot. To prove this, we can show you the pictures. Now you can see we really did use the bikes and the titration kit. For those who don't know what a titration kit is: It has been used to do chemical analysis of the groundwater samples we took from the field.

Next to the sweat we also had some blood. Henk has told us he had never seen such a spectacular double salto of a bike (with Noortje). He actually was scared. Luckily Noortje just had some scratches (see picture). Now she gained a lot respect of all daredevil guys.

The last prove is depicted in our final picture. Instead of a nice plant box and swimming pool at a bed and breakfast: hydrologists see here a nora (well) and a reservoir. Try to find it.
Tomorrow the work will start again. We'll keep you updated from Barra beach (our meeting room).

A day of rest, or not...?

In Barra, some students have taken the time available to do their washing, while others enjoyed their spare time discovering nightlife in Lisbon. The latter practice often is accompanied by too much beer and too little fado. But the journey by train to Aveiro will cure any illness.

Meanwhile, Vincent and Maarten went on to prepare the field course. This involved a lot of thinking while planning, followed by some shopping and frantic rummaging through the instruments in the garage. Finally we transported a big ugly shoe-shaped former soviet flat-bottom fishing boat to the Ria de Aveiro - in a car that would probably be deemed too small by the legal authorities - and practicing rowing to the island. As one of our students is actively rowing in a real Amsterdam Student Rowing Club (named Skoll), we think this activity may please her very much.

Things to do in the weekend...

While the students had their D-day, staff was driving through France and Spain all Saturday, only to arrive at Hotel Vegallana in the evening. This is a typical Spanish hotel annex bar annex restaurant, which is all about "El Toro". The bull fights were shown on televion, followed - contrastingly - by the European Song Festival. The meal (solomillo - sirloin steak) was excellent as always!!!

Discovered an unused, and unusually elegant, groundwater well in the back garden of a house in Boadillo, just behind the Vegallana Hotel, could not leave without taking a picture, even though it was only 6:50 am.

At 7 am on Sunday we drove off to Portugal. First dumped the contents of our van in the garage that was made available by the University of Aveiro (see picture below). After a good coffee and a pastel de nata, decided to take a look in the fieldwork area and visit one of our favourite places: Restaurante Sesta. Baffled again by the copious amounts of high quality food served there. Then went on to check where our students could place their discharge stations. Everything OK, rivers contained water...

First students will arrive tonight and all housing has been arranged. Amazed again that everything went as planned...

Saterday morning fever

Hi there!

Today was D-day, which means no sleep, some stress, a couple of beers/ tequila shots and the opportunity to upload pictures as we're bored now with no bikes around. The photos include a nora well (without the donkey) , the staff, some students and the good stuff: food :-)

Enjoy!