61 degrees in Mobile :)

Hello friends!

I hope I am finding you well! I will be posting a longer update in a few days, but I wanted to pop in to say hello quickly before I head home for the day. It's hard to believe that I am starting my third week here! I have had such a great time and I can't believe that my time here is coming to a close. People keep asking me if I'm going to move to Mobile--while I am definitely excited to return to sweet home Minnesota soon, I will keep Mobile in mind for the future. The city seems to be the perfect size for someone like me, the people are friendly, and the landscape and beaches are beautiful! What's not to love?

Speaking of beaches, some of you may have received beach photos from me via text message recently. In case you are wondering where those hail from, here is a brief explanation of some of the work I have been doing. Mobile Baykeeper is contributing to program called the Volunteer Field Observer Program. This was an effort created in response to the Gulf Oil Spill in April 2010 to mobilize Alabama citizens to monitor the coastlines for signs of oil on the coastline. Some parts of the coastline have been more consistently monitored than others, so for the past two weeks, Nicole (the AmeriCorps VISTA in charge of the VFOB program at Mobile Baykeeper) and I have been going out to visit beaches which have not gotten as much attention to see what their status is. Our first week out we visited the beaches at Gulf Shores and Perdido Beach. We found tarballs at both beaches, though more abundant in some places than others. This past week we went to Fort Morgan, a beach on the end of a peninsula which has been in the news for continuously having tarballs washing ashore. The pictures I saw in the news did not do justice to the display Nicole and I found. The oil buried in the sand far surpasses the term "tar patties." What we saw was closer to a network of tar slabs and pancakes, clearly weathered from weeks of laying untouched on the beach. We are going out again this week in hopes of checking out the situation at Dauphin Island, a barrier island on the western side of Mobile Bay.

The take home message is that there is still oil washing ashore! The clean up effort is not complete and anyone telling you otherwise is not sharing the whole story! Pictures to follow, hopefully.

All the best,
Bethany