New Brunswick Road Trips

 At the time of this writing, our home province of New Brunswick is closing in on its previously stated target of having given 75% of its populace at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine. The achievement of this target is supposed to lead to a loosening of restrictions, although I am not sure exactly what that means. Hopefully it will mean that we will be free to travel outside of the province sometime soon. In the meantime, AMOS has been busy traveling inside the province, doing demonstrations and collecting data. 

On June 03, AMOS was in Salisbury, doing a demonstration at some local wetlands. This was for a community project organized by high school students Daytona McMackin and and Rhianna Johnston. Amongst those in attendance were a grade 5 class from a  local elementary school, researchers from Mount Allison University, and members of the Petitcodiac Watershed Alliance. 

photo credit: Jennifer Colpitts, J Colpitts Photography

photo credit: Jennifer Colpitts, J Colpitts Photography

 photo credit: Jennifer Colpitts, J Colpitts Photography

photo credit: Jennifer Colpitts, J Colpitts Photography

photo credit: Jennifer Colpitts, J Colpitts Photography

The wetland area was fairly challenging in terms of its topography, with numerous grassy hillocks that required some careful route planning and / or manual driving to properly avoid. On a few occasions, these were not avoided, and AMOS became stuck, requiring a couple of outings in the kayak to nudge it into an area of deeper water. Apparently the demonstration was still suitably impressive for at least some of those in attendance: one grade 5 boy stated that he would ask his parents for an AMOS this year for Christmas. 😊

Here is the temperature and conductivity data collected with the AML Oceanographic probe:

The following week I took a trip back to the Lake Utopia area of New Brunswick, to sample Trout Lake, a small lake connected to the east end of Lake Utopia. The day was very hot and humid, and there seemed to be lots of fish (trout?) jumping out of the water to grab tasty flies. AMOS collected temperature, conductivity, and depth data over parts of the stream leading to the lake and the lake itself:

The above temperature data showed an interesting "cold zone" in the southeast corner of the lake where a stream emptied into it.

Much of the lake was quite shallow, although the middle area was a few m deep. 

This past week also included some software updates for both AMOS and the BoatCaptain PC software. It is now possible for customers to easily apply software updates to the AMOS boat by sending them through BoatCaptain. This should make it easy to add new features and improvements going forward.