Our first day at the Matatula station was the day that we toured the place, so really this should be part 2. That first day also consisted of looking for a suitable place to mess up the nicely cut lawn, making a couple of phone calls to explain to supervisors what we were up to, and getting verbal permission to place our station on the grounds.
The station was about a mile, in what seemed like mostly up when you had to walk to it, off the main island highway.
The day after we got permission to put in the station the keeper of the nicely maintained lawn and hedges, Lafaele Silao, got a head start and dug a nice hole before we even arrived in the morning. It was thought that we would run into rock about two feet down, but at about two and a half feet we failed to find any. The soil was nice, sticky clay. Not great for a site, especially on the top of a mountain, and right next to a cliff (the hedges in the picture below), and right above the ocean, but time will tell. Clay will basically shake like Jell-o in a bowl from the wave action of the ocean on top of the ground shaking in a normal manner from the simple pounding of the surf. That's the theory anyway. The data collected during the first service run will tell us for sure.
Us white people just couldn't resist making the hole a little more perfect.
The weather wasn't great so we decided to wait on mixing any cement. Mark went through some of the scrap aluminum that was left over from the old solar panel mounts and started putting together a new solar panel mount for our station. The design for our station was going to be quite a bit simpler than the old solar panel array.
2014-07-23