A Dunedin winter is never an ideal setting to wake up early to, yet on Saturday 2 July, a small group of four Year 12 Chemistry students, Sam Taylor, Erin Ford, Lily Chilcott, Sarah Jocelyn and Chemistry Teacher Dr Phillips, headed out well before 9am to the Chemistry laboratories at Otago University. The purpose of this was for the programme “Healthy Harbour Watchers”, which is under the leadership of Andrew Innes.

From the University, we headed out into the frost to travel down to Port Chalmers, and thanks to Dr Phillips’ careful driving, suffered no ice related issues of our own on a particularly frosty morning. Our first stop was Pulling Point, and while there we recorded the air temperature as a delightful 3 degrees, and from there tested the water temperature, salinity and conductivity, along with marking the cloud cover (75%), wind direction, and any unusual features with the water. Then we took samples of the water, and I was the unfortunate one to have to fully submerge my hands to fill a glass jar completely airtight with freezing harbour water for later bacteria analysis. We then went on again to Back Beach, and Mussel Bay, our other two sampling sites for the day, where we repeated the same tests,  this time involving a careful crawl into a rocky boat to more easily collect the water, and a near slip which resulted in water finding it’s way slightly above ones gumboot.

We headed back to the Chemistry labs, where it was lab coats and safety glasses on and time to work together with the other school students involved to analyse our samples. Sam and Erin headed off with the task of filtering the water through,  the occasional muddy brown sample became crystal clear, and Lily and myself became a fast moving team reading the phosphate levels of the water.

This is the first time any of us have had an opportunity quite like this, and we are incredibly glad to be a part of the team who will continue to make this valuable contribution to environmental science in Dunedin.

A big thanks on behalf of the team must go out to Dr Phillips and Otago Girls' for enabling us to take this opportunity, and to Andrew Innes who has graciously allowed us to be a part of the Healthy Harbour Watch programme.