The first monitoring in Bay of Ieranto

Now feeling more confident and professional with kayaks (and with professional I mean finally I could turn my kayak without shouting “Francescoooo, how do you do this?? Wait, wait for me!”) we went to Ieranto bay. The day was a little bit colder than usual but that didn’t stop me, Latvian power, from going swimming in the beautiful bay. After we separated in to two groups, Radek and Nuria snorkeling in Ieranto Bay and me, Lisa (american trainee at the Sant’Anna Institute) and Mimi with kayaks monitoring and learning about the nature and caves.

We were kayaking when suddenly it started raining and we went inside a cave to hide from rain. We didn’t waste this time and started studying details about the first cave, named Capitello . What Mimi asked us was to notice the differences of organisms in darker side of the cave and the lighter side. We also learned about different colors of rocks and their structure. We learned some fun stories  about history of these caves. For example how monks came to a certain cave here and prayed. Or how many years ago lonely fisherman would come to Ieranto bay, see a cave and its details would remind them of female.  Then after some time it stopped raining, we went outside and unfortunately saw a boat anchored in the protected area. We kayaked to the boat and explained about protected areas and how it is not possible to stay here. Luckily they left right away and we continued exploring area and monitoring.

After we returned to Ieranto bay to get our beautiful Czech and Spanish volunteers and now it was our turn to give them a tour about what we just explored.  It was a good exercise to understand place where we would spend most of the summer. So we spent great time teaching, shouting “Ragazzi! Attenzione!” (Kids! Attention!), laughing, splashing water on each other, and singing even when it started raining really hard.  In the end of the day we returned back to Nerano feeling hungry and tired but always with good tiredness and joy of yet again learning something new!