Outreach

9th March

It's all been pretty busy, but I have photos of two events so I'll talk about those. I made marmalade out of the oranges on the tree in our back garden, and rather unintentionally produced enough to keep Paddington Bear going for at least a year. Then I did some diving after a break of two months and explored the depths of La Jolla Shores. One dive was a night dive and it was so so cold... the others were fun though.

Oh yes, and I have joined a group of physicists from around the US to do a group blog. It's called Imaginary Potential and you can find out what we all have to say here.

A kelp bass (there were loads of them swimming all around us), and some sort of ray on the right. There was some debate about exactly what it was, so I can't tell you. And below, my car and the shores, just before the sun went down for the night dive.

25th March

The past six days have been taken up with a trip. I'm not sure where it was a trip to, as all I did was move from one place to another for six days, but it was a lot of fun. I travelled to New York by plane, and then Luke and I travelled by train (for 8 hours) to Virginia Beach to meet Luke's brother Jan. Then the three of us travelled by sailing boat from somewhere in Chesapeake Bay to somewhere 100 miles south. And now I'm travelling back to San Diego.

My only previous sailing experience was on a very small boat about 10 years ago, so I had a lot of sailing jargon to learn. We stopped each night at a marina along the way and slept on the boat. It was cold (as you can see from the photos) but otherwise the weather was amazing, mostly clear and sunny and with a decent amount of wind in the right direction.

Most of these photos were taken by Jan...

I got very excited by the standing waves in my tea from the boat's motor as we left on the first day. Most of the time we were under sail, but getting in and out of harbours was much easier with the engine.