EFLTV

Volunteer handbook

Excerpts from the book we hand to every new walker.

The full handbook is printed on recycled stock and stapled at the harbormaster's. These excerpts are the parts readers tell us they return to most.

1. What to carry

The standard walk-bag, as packed for nineteen years:

  • Notebook, weather-resistant. We use Rite-in-the-Rain style pads. Ballpoint pen; pencil as backup (ink runs, graphite doesn't).
  • Laminated datasheet for your program. One side for the fixed columns; one side for the "anything else."
  • A wristwatch. Not your phone. Phones die in saltwater and at inconvenient times.
  • Tide table card for the current month. Hollis prints them in January.
  • Thermometer, floating. For Tidepool Watch. One per team, read at pool three.
  • Pell frame (Transects) or field guide (Tidepool & Schoolroom). The Pell frame lives in the shed; sign it out.
  • Binoculars, 8×42 if you have them, for the Shorebird Log. We lend a pair if you don't.
  • Something warm. The estuary is always a few degrees colder than the forecast, and stillness compounds it.
  • A thermos. This is not optional.

2. How to write an entry

Our handbook's most underlined passage, as far as we can tell from the secondhand copies:

Write as if a stranger ten years from now will read your entry and need to know what you saw. They won't have your memory. They will have your words.

Practical rules we try to hold to:

  1. Fill every column. Even if the answer is "none" or "not checked." A blank column can't tell the difference.
  2. Units always. "62" is not a count; "62 periwinkles in the Bream Frame" is.
  3. Hedges are welcome. "Possibly a juvenile rock gunnel; see sketch." Don't guess and don't refuse to guess. Write the guess with its uncertainty attached.
  4. Time in 24-hour. "Low tide 05:12," not "just after five."
  5. Weather in four words or fewer. "Light wind, cloud, cool."
  6. Sign and date. Initials are fine. Dates are not.

3. How to leave a site

We borrow a phrase from the fisher Lou Mackett: "Leave the cove the way you'd want to find your own kitchen."

  • Return every overturned rock to its original orientation. If you can't remember which way it faced, set it down gently; don't stack.
  • Pack out anything you brought in, including broken flagging tape. We budget one roll of orange tape per season — if you are using more, ask why.
  • Do not feed, prod, or relocate anything living. This includes the hermit crabs, which the children will ask you about. Especially the hermit crabs.
  • Make a visual sweep of the site before you leave. Notebooks are often the thing left behind; this is how binder #14 lost four pages to a rising tide in 2017.

4. A few tide basics

You don't need to be an oceanographer to walk a transect. You do need to know a handful of words:

  • Spring tide: not a season. The deepest low and highest high of each fortnight, around new and full moon.
  • Neap tide: the gentler swings, around first and third quarter.
  • Slack: the quiet minutes around high or low water when nothing much moves. The best window for Tidepool Watch.
  • Walking window: ninety minutes either side of predicted low water. Outside that window, come back tomorrow.
  • Tidal reach: the part of a river or estuary where water rises and falls with the sea — which, here, is almost all of it.

5. Glossary (just ours)

The Bream Frame
Our fixed photo-reference at each tidepool site. Named for Hollis Bream, who marked the first one with a chisel in 2006.
Pell-frame quadrat
A 30 cm square aluminum frame used for counting in the marsh. Built by Arjun Pell. Heavy on purpose.
Saturday-six
The six-week spring training, taught Saturdays. Curriculum barely changed since 2011.
The harbor bulletin
The cork board at the harbormaster's office. Annual summary posted there first, every February.
Open-walk
Our one public event of the year. First Saturday after the April spring tide. Introductions, questions, a slow lap of Willet's Cove.
"Green crab weather"
A day on which nothing unusual happened. From the reliability of green crab counts.

6. When unsure

Three options, in order:

  1. Ask your walking partner. Two sets of eyes on a tidepool is always better than one.
  2. Write the observation anyway, marked "unknown — see sketch," and keep moving. We can identify later.
  3. If it's a safety question — a slipping rock, a tide rising faster than expected, a storm line appearing — stop the walk. Lost time is cheap; lost volunteers are not.

— handbook, seventh edition, page 34