Yes, the forklift and why I’m hauling so much cement

I ran into a few friends I hadn’t seen in a while on campus the other day and as we were having a quick catch up she said, you know, we’ve been wondering about the forklift that is popping up in your facebook status. Are you referring to driving around an actual forklift or is this some sort of analogy/inside joke that I don’t know about?
Well, I’ll my jokes about driving around in my forklift and hauling cement are centered around the fact that lately I’ve been spending a lot of time driving around a forklift and hauling a lot of cement. And yes, I probably would have been just as good at this before I decided it was time to become part of the highly educated elite of the marine science community but then again yes, my new found passion for lugging around cement sacks more than half my own body weight is, in a way it is very relevant to my making it into that distinguished group.
For the sturgeon project I’m currently working on, acoustic tracking plays a central role. We catch the fish and pop a tag into them and toss them back into the water. The way we track them, is that we deploy receivers in NY Bight and when they swim past them the receiver picks up the tag signal we know which fish is swimming were.
Now, getting those receivers placed onto the bottom of the ocean is a bit more difficult that it sounds and imvolves huge cement blocks that hold them. And somebody, somebody you see has to make those cement blocks, and it happens to be me!
We’ve got to huge metal molds with a hole in the bottom. To get set up, I line them with a cut open garbage bag (yeah, as I continue this description you’ll soon notice how highly sophisticated the whole process is!), then take a PVC tube with a reed bar inserted in one end and wedge it into that hole. The PVC tube is the center piece of our little work of art – this is what will later hold the receiver. Then I start prepping a couple of red plastic cups with reed bars that will later make various anchor points for ropes and straps.
Once I’ve got everything set up, I start setting up to mix cement. Each mooring is filled with seven 80 pound cement sacks. I lug them to the boathouse door where I’ve already set up the cement mixer (at least I’m not mixing all this by hand!) and start mixing cement to sacks at a time. I fill the finished cement into a wheelbarrow to shovel into the molds. Mixing cement involves a lot of deadlifting cement bags. I’m too short to lift them cement bags into the mixer, so I use a cinder block as a stepping stone. Once I’ve filled the molds I make sure we’ve got a nice flat surface which I engrave and then let the whole thing dry for a day.
I’m usually covered in cement but the time I finish so I head home for a long hot shower. Getting cement off is not an easy task. All the cement dust settles in my hair, and it usually doesn’t come out properly – actually I’m fairly sure that it turns to cement which is making my hair do even weirder things than usual.
The next day I go to get the moorings out of the molds. This is the tricky part and also the part that involves the forklift. I maneuver it around in the boathouse until I can slip a strap looped through a reed bar in the mooring over the forks. Theoretically, I should be able to lift I straight out, pull out the strap, but it through another loop, flip over the mooring and store it outside next to the parking lot.
In practice, that rarely happens. Instead I have developed a new method, in which I take the entire mold out into the parking lot, flip the whole thing over (at this point the mooring will usually still insist on staying in the mold instead of giving into gravity) and then continue lifting and dropping it onto the curb until it drops out.
I have learned not to use that method during “rush hour” when everyone is leaving school because people give me really, really odd looks… my friends are convinced that I’m having withdrawal from rugby now that the season is over and are suggesting alternate forms of anger management.