Doyoudare goes Beachinspector! Last week I travelled to Gran Canaria to become a Beach Editor. Beachinspector.com sent me to my first “on-site-job” in our office in Maspalomas. Read all about my job, our fun team and what I’m actually working. Have fun with my Beach-Diaries!
Read The Beach-Diaries #1: How the hell did I get this job?
We meet at Hanover airport. The rest of the team is on their way from Berlin by bus and time really is running out. When they stumble into the departure hall, check-in is about to close. So enough adrenaline for one morning! Chatting on the plane, time passes quickly. A five-hour flight from Hanover to Las Palmas later, our team picks up our four rental cars and we arrived sound and safe at our new office. Our “headquarter” for the time being is located in the heart of Maspalomas, only a ten-minute drive to the major beaches of the island: Playa del Inglés and Playa de Maspalomas. From our deck we can even see the ocean and a little bit of the huge world-famous sand dune, the “Dunas de Maspalomas”. In these dunes you truly travel to the desert and it’s too easy to believe that the West Sahara is only a few kilometers away.
After one day of settling in, we dive right into our daily routine: In the mornings I’d get the pictures and videos shot by “my” two Beach Inspector teams the day before to review them and write a description about “their” beaches. Each team has a workload of about two to three beaches a day, two to five hours a beach, depending on the size and the location of it. Before I tagged along for a beach inspection for the first time, I was wondering: Does this really take this long? Well, believe me, it does!
You can assess almost anything.
But how do you “assess” a Beach?
It goes like this: The first Beach Inspectors begins with the first obligatory pictures: overview, left side, right side, from the water, to the water, etc. Meanwhile, the other “BI”, as we are also called, starts to fill out the beach form: Was it easy to find? How clean is the beach? What crowd do you encounter here? After this, the Beach Inspectors start looking for locals, restaurant owners or equipment rentals to fill out a questionnaire and do an interview about “their” beach. There is no better expert on a beach than the people living there!
The last step of this process is the beach introduction video. In a very short clip one of the two beach inspectors sums up all the important information about the beach and I am really impressed by the professional way of the BIs shooting their video right there at the beach: It’s hot, windy, noisy or even raining, but still you get the feeling that the Beach Inspector is having a whale of a time there when watching their video.
And what does the “Beach Editor” do?
My job is to put the pictures, the beaches, if you like, in words and review everything my BI’s produce: Videos, pictures, notes. Apart from my writing, editing and review job, I get to do “specials” on some days and follow one of the BI teams to their sites. In my first week, I do a blog article about Sandra’s and my first day as Beach Inspectors which really was a lot of fun and helped tremendously for my editing to understand what kind of material can be produced and what can’t. All in all, I sail smoothly through my first week and don’t even notice the days passing. Though when the weekend arrived, I realize that I haven’t even made into the ocean! So, clearly, being a Beachinspector obviously is a real job like any other!
About the advantage to work where other people go for vacation
However, this shortcoming is quickly remedied. What kind of Beach Inspector would I be, if I didn’t know the waters around Gran Canaria like the back of hand after these weeks? On our first day off, we – of course – have nothing better to do than to go to the beach again! Clearly, we love what we do! This time, though, we don’t do any interviews, don’t walk the full length of the beach nor do I busily scribble notes all the time. We just hang out for a change, go surfing, snorkeling and work hard on our tan. Well, there clearly is a huge advantage about working where other people travel for their holidays: At the end of your work week you’re not just going for a walk, you walk at the beach. You’re not simply meeting at the local pub, but in the bar at your home beach right outside your office. And you never get tired to hang out where you work. If that isn’t something!
Read more about my experiences with Beachinspector, how I became a Beach Editor AND Beach Director, and of course how I managed to work in the middle of a place where everyone else is on vacation…
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