Salty Dave's Wetland Weblog

Hello! Thanks for stopping by – please pull up a chair and make yourself comfy.

I’m Dave, and I’m coming up on the end of my 2nd year as “Executive Project Manager” of the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project. It’s been a few months since someone called me “the new John Bourgeois” (who held this position for 9 years before me), which means I’m probably done with my start-up phase.

We’re trying out something new here at the Project’s website: a blog! I know: blogs are very 2002…but, uh…having had yet another birthday, I realized that I’m getting old enough that 2002 doesn’t seem that long ago to me. I still have a sweatshirt from 1996 that I wear pretty often, so I’m not discarding a good piece of casualwear OR a fun way to reach the stakeholders and various audiences for the Restoration Project just because either one dates back to the Clinton administration.¹

With all of the (totally appropriate and necessary, seriously) COVID-19 restrictions, we can’t have the public events, site tours, or other in-person meetings that we normally would. And, if we’re being honest, the magic and fun of Zoom and Microsoft Teams has worn off a little even as the utility and critical functionality continues to grow and improve. So our project team was casting around for ways to keep people informed about what we are doing when and where, share insights and stories, and stay connected to the many groups of people that care about our project.

Scientists, environmentalists, students, birdwatchers, hikers/bikers, environmental advocates, partner city and county agencies, neighboring landowners, and others are at least occasional visitors to these pages, so every week or so, we’ll have a new blog entry here to help inform, entertain and connect with the readers. We’ll include updates, answers to the most frequently asked questions, reflections on our natural and built environments, and whatever else seems interesting.

These will mostly be written by me, but we’ll have guest pieces, and I’d gratefully welcome and accept contributions from any of you! (Drop me a line if you want to talk about topics or our unimaginably rigorous submittal and review process…)

The remaining hurdle in this is figuring out what to call this thing. The initial suggestion was "Salty Dave’s Wetland Weblog." It’s catchy and is reminiscent of the salt marshes we are aiming to restore. But "salty" in reference to a person means "ill-tempered, bitter, irritated, or being a complaining sore loser," and only SOME of those words apply to me. We’ll go with it for now, but we had other ideas like "Tidal Flows," "Once More Into The Breach," "Marshland Musings," and more. Please let me know if you have any more or better ideas. We’re definitely open to them.  

Stick with us on this. It’ll be fun.

1. If you are under 30, a “blog” was shorthand for “web log,” and it was an ongoing journal of thoughts or essays that were published on an individual person’s or organization’s website. Think of really long Twitter posts. Oh, and we all had our own Twitters; they weren’t all tagged to each other on a common platform. Hard to believe, right? Anyway, back to the blog…