week 1 reflection

 This week, Sam and I were traveling a lot to go meet up with people we reached out to months back and we also stayed local this week a couple of days and did some fishing and also did some beach cleaning. On Monday, Sam and I didn't have anything scheduled so we decided to go to numerous different beaches and clean up the beaches, specifically looking for plastics and fishing nets, which we were successful with. At the end of the day we gathered a lot of trash, separated the trash into separate piles to show the diversity, and then took a video of it for our blog. The next day, Tuesday, we went to the store and bought fishing gear, after about an hour we went to the ocean off a spot Sams mother recommended and attempted to catch a fish for about 2-3 hours, that didn't end up working out very well so we went to a different spot and tried there for about 2 more hours and had no luck at all. Later that night we went out and went fishing one more time at a place near Sams house and still had no luck with the fish. ( the reason we are trying to catch fish is because we wanted to bring it to URI so we could dissect it and look at the plastics that enter the fishes ). On Wednesday we traveled over to woods hole oceanographic institute ( WHOI ) and met up with a family friend of mine, Jim Flynn, who is the head of fundraising at WHOI and he showed us around the whole campus of WHOI, in between our tour we scheduled a couple of meetings with some senior scientists and they talked about their profession and how they got into it and there beliefs behind plastic pollution and what they are trying to do to help. These men were named Chris Reddy and Mark Hahn, both chemistry and biology scientists at WHOI. On Thursday Sam and I went fishing again the whole entire day, 10 hours of fishing that day and we didn't catch a single thing, felt like kind of a waste but when we go fishing again we know where to go and what to bring because we went into it with low information on how lucky we were going to get. On Friday we went to URI and talked to Sams mothers close friend who is the director of US coastal programs, Jen McCann, she was our initial mentor but we decided to switch to Sams mother because Jen has been very busy. Anyways Jen showed us around the marine side of URI and we met up with a woman named Lindsay who is studying the plastics that enter birds and how that affects them and other species, and we also talked to a woman named Sarah who did the sam thing as Lindsay but does it with water species like crabs and oysters and fish. That was our week this week, very busy and got lots of stuff done, and we are also much more educated on our topic which was our goal.