June 18^th

Today we made coconut oil!  The Ulithi girls showed us how.  We did a very small batch, maybe just 10 or 15 coconuts.  Ground the cocos by hand on their lathes, and cold pressed the shavings by hand.  Put resulting oil/water mix over a fire on the beach to reduce it to just the oil.  The result was just a few ounces, the bottom third of a water bottle.  But my hands haven’t felt so good and smooth since I’ve been here.  Smells delicious, too. 

We then went out to do more coral size-frequency in the reef outside the lodge – our initial data here from the first day of sampling was not nearly robust enough.  Lucas got some good fire coral to the leg.  Keenan found a huge leopard cowry!  That evening, the Ulithi kids came over and Sara presented to us all a summary of the data we had collected thus far.  It was really fantastic to see some graphs made up of what we had accomplished so far.  Put everything into context, too. 

This is Sara’s last night here – she is leaving in the morning, well before the rest of us.  So we threw her a party and sung her a song, of course!  Her presence here will be much missed but we’ll meet again one day. 

PS, Peter caught a baby monitor lizard earlier today!  Super neat.