The Emery Method, Ping Pong, and a Fried Clam Overdose

This past week, Team Jason took on South Boston and parts of the Seaport. We started off the week by hitting up the Lawn on D on Tuesday to work on our deliverable. The topic we tackled this week was accessibility in South Boston. 

Accessibility is a pretty broad topic, but we chose to interpret it in terms of a few different types of access: access to public transportation, access for people with disabilities, and price barriers to entry. The Lawn on D was one of the three sites we talked about. Besides working on the deliverable, we had a great time on the swings, and a few heated matches of ping pong. Not to flex or anything, but I kind of cooked the opposition.

On Wednesday, we took a ferry ride out to Winthrop, where we were partnering with an organization that does beach surveying. They taught us all about the ins and outs of measuring beach profiles, using two different methods:

    There's the Emery method, which involves painstakingly measuring the change in the elevation between two sticks at six foot intervals across the width of the shore using nothing but your eyes and the horizon line, and then there's the right way, where you just make a GPS do the work for you. You can probably guess which was my favorite. Jokes aside, measuring beach profiles, while definitely not the most glorified task you could ask for, is a useful tool for tracking the rate of erosion, which is of crucial importance for the many residents of Winthrop living right along the shore, and I think that I did really learn a lot from the experience.

 The weather on Thursday was quite rainy and gray, so we were forced to push back our trip to Castle Island until Friday. Fortunately, Mother Nature decided to throw us a bone, and Friday was a beautiful day, so we got together at Broadway station and took the bus to the *peninsula* together (yeah, Castle "Island" is a fraud, someone had to say it).  It was Aleena's last day with our group, so I'm glad we were all able to get together in person instead of just meeting remotely to finish our deliverable. Visiting Castle Island every once in a while is a must for Bostonians and tourists alike, but I would advise against loading up on the fried clams from Sully's if you have any hope of doing anything else that day, because the moment I got home from work I was. knocked. out.

 Thanks for reading, and I'll see you out on the Harbor!

- Alex Messier

(**PS**) If you haven't been following the official Save the Harbor instagram already, first of all, what are you doing with your life, but more importantly, you totally should because that's where you can (hopefully) find our infographic on accessibility! We chose to focus on three of the most popular sites in South Boston: The Lawn on D, Carson Beach, and Castle Island. It's quite literally the best thing you'll read in your entire life. I may be bit biased though.