July 8 by Orion D.

Today was a sunny day around 70 degrees. When I got there, Raymond was taking out his minnow trap. I threw my backpack into the garage and ran to see what he had caught. He caught some minnows. Raymond swept the bucket into the water to gather some for the minnows. While he was doing that he caught 2 sunfish. We brought them up to Sarah. She said we should probably start working on our tank. We asked Lenny if it was ok. Lenny asked how long it would take. Sarah said Not that long. Ok because we have a walk to take and a little competition.  I couldn’t wait for the competition part. I didn’t know what it was but I knew if it was a competition, I knew it would fun!

Sarah went up to the attack and got a tank. Lenny poked his head into the lab and told us it was time to go. Sarah said she would finish up the tank. Lenny brought us to the shop and told us about the competition. The teams were boys against girls. Each of us had to start out with three trash bags, we will be collecting trash from the beach. Each team will have one robotic hand. We ran down to the beach. We went onto the beach  to pick up trash and Lenny walked over and told us where there was a lot of trash. He told us to walk over to the big old lobster traps full of trash. We thought that would be a good idea. We knew we wouldn’t need the robotic hand so we left it on the bench. We started picking up trash from the sides of the lobster traps. We then had to get a lot of trash. We took a lobster trap off the pile and stuck our hand into the hole and pulled trash out of the pot. We got so much trash out of the lobster pots that we had to get three more trash bags! We knew we had won because the girls hadn’t come back for more bags. We already had 6 bags of trash!

The girls found a bottle with a bottle with powdery stuff in it. It looked like sand but it turns out that IT WAS ASHES. You could see a note in the bottle too. Lenny said he would walk it back out to the ocean at high tide and put it back. It was only from May, the note said. I don’t want to write about that because it is creepy.

After that we went to the beach to swim and wash the trash off us. We went back. The agreement was whoever won would get Italian Ice. The final score was 6 to three boys. Since we won. Lenny lied though. If you won you got Italian ice, if you lost you got Italian ice.

Then we lead a walk.  we told them about position ivy and walked them down to the broccoli trees – golden arborvitis. The trees look like broccoli because they eat the branches and will actually stand on their back legs to eat it. They love it, it tastes like popcorn to them but to use it tastes like pepper. 

We then brought them through the sand plain grasslands. That is the most endangered habitat in the whole world. It is flat and by the ocean so people like to build their houses on it. 50% of the stand plain grassland that is left is on Nantucket. We then showed them smooth sumac and told them that you can make tea out of it. We showed them fox grape; the leaves look like the head of a fox. We took them down the path and showed them the vernal pool. We went back up the path and ate some Italian Ice. Afterwards we went tot the beach. It was a long but fun day.