Panther Bake Marine Lab

In our 2nd letter to the Kleins/ Salt Company, we asked about the possibility of putting a trailer (here “caravan”) at our camping spot near the oyster hatchery. As the weather has grown cooler and damper, we have moved increasingly into the hatchery, especially for meals and, sigh, long stints on our computers. The hatchery is certainly warmer – a combination of wind protection and heated water – but also humid and a little cramped due to tanks, filters, raceways, and odds and ends of production and research equipment. Since April 6, the tanks have been full of Ostrea edulis larvae: one of the oysters that Alan collected from the salt pond must have been brooding, and he has since been father to 10s of thousands – feeding them microalgae from the guano pond, adjusting their temperature, and changing their water regularly. But the hatchery is not really a place to hang out during the winter. The Kleins were happy to allow some more permanent camping structures, so we started looking at a variety of options: The few used trailers that Alan priced were around $N70,000, out of our range. We were excited for a while about products offered by the Container Company, which provides shipping containers for all sorts of purposes, complete with doors and windows if you wish. But they too were a bit expensive. Meanwhile, the Kleins were also looking around for housing options, and they have been much more successful! First, they found a contractor to build a 5x4 m room on one side of the hatchery – as an extreme example of how cheap some materials and labor are, the entire concrete block building cost $N7000. About 7 people worked on it for nearly a week. Okay, so it’s not exactly square, and mortar was used generously to get the window and door to fit…. The Kleins have outfitted it with spare parts from their properties – a bay window with a bay view, work table and sink, and desk. It will be a fantastic place to use microscopes (less rusty than the hatchery sauna), work on papers, and watch the winter weather on the coast, while keeping an eye on any larvae that we can foster overwinter. So – there is now a new marine lab with running seawater on the Namibian coast, just meters away from some exceptional rocky intertidal areas, close to the salt ponds and bird sanctuary! We can easily see that there is a lifetime of questions to be answered here.
The Kleins also rescued a vintage 70s caravan from a neighbor’s backyard, painted the outside, cleaned the spiders out of the inside, and have provided us with a dining and living room. It’s about 2x3 m. The windows at each end prop open, and a bit of the top pops up, which allows Alan to look outside (and stand up straight!). The 2-burner stove seems heavenly after cooking on the Bluet (hunched over one burner), as does sitting at a table to eat. I guess after a month and a half and a little cold wind, camping has lost some of its luster. Katie has already fallen in love with the caravan (dubbed Hotel California by the Kleins), literally crying when it was hauled away to a safer storage place while we were in Windhoek. We owe the Kleins for many things – stimulating conversations, access to field sites, several fresh fish to grill on the braai (=barbecue in Namibia), the key to the hot shower near the Seabird Guano (Pty) building, and now these truly generous acts to help us be comfortable and productive. Well, the only drawback to the new lab is that it is possible to get locked inside the hatchery – this happened one night when I went back in to work on curriculum documents. I kept thinking that Alan would come rescue me as soon as Katie awoke and needed her mom to get back to sleep, which always happens by 10 pm… or at least by midnight… although sometimes she can sleep through until 2 am… and apparently Alan can pat her back to sleep until 3:30 am, when he at last opened the door and wondered when I was coming to bed. I was only too glad to do so.
So there it is: Panther Bake Marine Lab. Panther Bake should be pronounced in German, and Panther was the name of the German ship that placed a light (bake) at that site many decades ago. The light is now gone, but the name remains to grace the salt “mining” area and other activities on that stretch of coast.