Gabrun Yacht Club.

Part of the remit for the Geographers was to take core samples from the lake bed of Lake Gabrun, an oasis about 45 km north of our base at Germa. It involves a sporting drive through the dunes, which with a strong wind was quite challenging. The difficulty is that the wind soon blows away all traces of previous tracks, leaving us to pick our own route following GPS waypoints. Once there - four hours instead of the usual two, we launched the bigger of my two inflatables and Simon, who rowed for a minor Oxford team in his youth, had a preliminary paddle about and sank a 6 inch drain pipe into the mud at the base of the lake. This was to be the site of the core sampling the next day following a comfortable nights camping where we cooked chicken with garlic and lemon juice, wrapped in foil, on the fire. The morning dawned fine and with the bigger boat as lake base station, Kev paddled back and forth with the core samples in the dinky little yellow boat. These cores went through four meters of mud to the bottom which was sand. Once back in the UK these will be examined for organic matter - plants and Diatoms (single cell life forms) to establish what was going on there over the last 2000 years or so as the lake went from wet to dry to wet again. The beauty of this science is that everything ends up on the lake bed offering a neat cross section of life. Pics show an overall view of proceedings from half way up a dune, our camp and one of the core samples laid out on a sand ladder. This was then wrapped in foil and slid into the drain pipe for safe transit back to UK.