Text Julia van der Westhuyzen. Photo Guy Ackermans Everyone on the campus is indispensable, but not everyone is in the spotlight every day or gets much of the credit for the hard (team)work that goes on. Resource puts these colleagues in the limelight for the Key People series. This time, meet Wouter Suykerbuyk, a researcher at the Wageningen Marine Research Institute in Yerseke.
‘One of my favourite activities that we do in the Southwest Delta is fieldwork. We often need to reach tricky places like tidal flats. For this we use longboats. A longboat (the Dutch name is “sloep”) is an aluminum motor boat that is our essential tool for doing fieldwork here in the delta. At the moment we have two of them – one of about 6 metres long and one of about 4.5 metres. They are terrific boats! Every project leader has their own requirements and wishes, so we have combined these requirements in boats that we’ve equipped specifically for our work. So our longboats have to be like “a sheep with five legs”, as the Dutch saying goes. One of my jobs is maintaining the longboats and sometimes looking for the extra “leg”. I work on the principle that the boats should be “click and collect”: ready for researchers to take them out of storage and go.
I have a lot of other day-to-day tasks besides this. Everything from collecting data in the field to writing reports and papers. Every day it’s a battle to time your work right for between the tides. No two days are the same and that’s what I like about my job.
I don’t care how tough (or muddy, cold, wet) it is. I’m a real fieldwork tiger
Something really important (besides drinking coffee) is connecting with project leaders to plan data collection and fieldwork. Since I have a background in research, having done a PhD, I know from experience how important it is to have reliable data. So I try to be the project leader’s eyes and ears in the field. I always explain to people that I have two speeds: fast and extra fast. In the field I just want to get the job done and I really don’t care how tough (or muddy, cold or wet) it is. I’m a real fieldwork tiger.
The projects I’m involved in take me to the most extraordinary and beautiful places in our delta. One of my favourite projects at the moment is about optimizing oyster farming in the sea. With my background as an oyster farmer, I can bridge the gap between the oyster farmers and the researchers. Another special project of ours focuses on the Oosterschelde lobster. We are trying to gain a fuller understanding of the lobster’s biology and ecology.’
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