Friday 31 August 2007

A tank of evidence

Way back in June, you may remember that we went back up to the Lake District in search of giant eels. A few days before we left, Graham collected a fish tank that was still back in Exeter. As you can see from the picture, this is a large tank by normal standards, and upon its arrival here, was put on the gravel outside the office window, basically in readiness for any eels that we may be lucky enough to catch as specimens for our on-going investigation into the size of eels in our lakes.

There it has sat since it arrived. No, no that is not a moan (me? moan? I merely make constructive observations and would never dream of moaning). I am purely mentioning it here in my blog, as it came to my notice recently that it is now almost full of water – rainwater to be precise - so I thought it would be interesting to log how much rainfall we have, in fact, had since 15th June in this part of Devon. No, not as much as some unfortunate people in certain areas in the July floods, but even so I reckon that 12¾ inches in just over two months is a pretty substantial amount. Only 5 inches to go and it will be overflowing. Yes, I still work in feet and inches – I refuse to succumb to metric measurements and find it a hopeless task trying to visualise centimetres – for example say 6 inches to me and I know in my mind immediately how big that is, but say 6 centimetres and I have not got a clue!

Anyway, I am going to keep an eye on the tank and see how long it takes to fill to the brim in the coming weeks. But, of course, you know what will happen don’t you? Some bright spark will decide to empty the darn thing and put it away, and my scientific experiment will be down the drain - literally.

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