Month of July , 2007

When you live in a house, the weather is something you hear and look out at. When you live on a sailing boat the weather is something you feel and smell. You cannot close the doors and the windows and create your own micro climate inside. You feel the changes in temperature and humidity much more acutely.

While out and about, we saw a car driver throw a piece of plastic out of his brand new, shiny MPV. As we regularly see dolphins and turtles saved from plastic, and have seen various animals die by drowning as they have been caught in plastic, or die because they have eaten it, this for me was enough reason to tell the man about the consequences of his carelessness. I got out of the car and walked towards his car.

Yesterday the fish market at Las Galletas was closed in celebration of Saint Carmen’s day, so we set off again today to this pleasant coastal town to again try to film the fish market, in the hope that the townspeople had slept off the effects of the celebrations. While we never expect too much from a fish market, given the challenges the fishermen face in catching the few fish left, the market was even sorrier than we expected.

Sometimes you just can’t be prepared enough. This morning’s agenda was to go to the bustling town of Las Galletas to film its small fish market, and then go on to the village of Los Abrigos to film the fishing boats in the small harbour. In the afternoon we would try to find fruit plantations. We got our stuff together and packed up the car, piling Quirky on top, and set off to Las Galletas.

UNESCO has just declared the Mount Teide National Park on Tenerife as a World Heritage Site. And rightly so as not only is it ruggedly beautiful, but this volcanic region contains unique ecosystems and a range of endemic flora and fauna. So when we went out to find and film different ecosystems, it was a logical choice to start with the slopes of Teide.

May was a busy month for the Morganonline team. We have now settled in the Canary Islands and are busy with the work we really came to do here, i.e. making films. During the first two weeks we were visited by some of our friends who are helping us with our work. First Pieter and Laureline came to give us a crash course in film making. Next, Ben, our webmaster, came to get a feeling for what it is like to be part of the Morganonline team. The rest of the month was mainly spent on shooting film images.

Turtles are dominating my week. After taking a mortally wounded turtle to the Centro de Recuperación de Fauna Silvestre (Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre for Wildlife) in La Laguna a couple of days ago and miserably watching it being euthanised, I became involved in the rescue of another Loggerhead turtle.

‘This was the first time I’ve seen an animal euthanised’ I told our friend Susana Saavedra on the way back from the Centro de Recuperación de Fauna Silvestre (Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre for Wildlife) in La Laguna. She looked at me.