I write this in Cairns airport, with a latte and a wireless connection for breakfast. Funny how easily one settles back into it, when yesterday I was soaking in the great blue sea on my last swim, nothing but coral reef and horizon as far as you could see. (Unfortunately it turned out to be my last wade as the tide had gone out; I plonked myself down in the knee deep water and watched a juvenile damsel use me for shelter.) I got into Cairns last night and at first it was fairly unsurprising, but then as I walked down the esplanade towards the town centre and the number of people went up and I hit my first restaurants, buzzing with neon lights and chattering customers and enticing menus, it all seemed so very, well, novel. It's only after two months on a tropical island I suppose that I would actively choose to walk the restaurant and souvenir store strip of road, rather than through the grassy parkland flanking the sea. I am glad to be back in civilisation, I do like my lattes and I have always really been a city girl, but I also already miss the peace and beauty and solitude (when you want) of Lizard. Although most researchers on the island work their butts off and barely ever see the scenery, there is still a calm to it. When you are bumpily driving along in your boat getting soaked with cold spray at 7 in the morning, not quite awake, having just dropped a tank on your toe, with three dives ahead of you and recalcitrant fish, you generally still manage to recognise that it is a beautiful drive, the best commute in the world. So I am glad to be done with field season one, but I'm also already looking forward to number two.
We stopped fieldwork a few days before leaving the island to allow plenty of time to pack and clean (I never did get eggs again successfully, which is a real shame, but I still hope to make it work more reliably next trip). The directors of the station, Anne and Lyle, decided to spend their day off on the outer Barrier Reef and very kindly invited us along, and so after well over a hundred dives in my two rather nondescript study sites in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef lagoon, we finally got to experience what it was all meant to be about.
On this particular day what it was all about was this:
Cod Hole! Where the visibility is close to 30 metres (in the Coral Sea, just beyond the outer barrier, it regularly exceeds this -- after some 6 metre vis dives on an island where there is a known crocodile this sounds like paradise) and the coral is kaleidoscopic and the huge potato cod are extremely friendly. A couple of them took an especial shine to me and would swim right at me then just sort of stay there, bumping my knee in a friendly fashion every so often for a good half an hour, the perfect fish face models. I couldn't actually get far enough away from them to take anything but fish face photos. We have a theory that they thought the blue coil lanyard on my camera housing was a pilchard, which the big dive operators feed to the cod in a bit of a circus act -- 20 divers with cameras sitting in a large circle with a lady with a large box of dead pilchards in the middle, moving round it with the cod following her and feeding it in front of each diver so that they could get a good shot. Well away from the mayhem of the circle we had our own much more personal experiences with the fish. They were wonderful individuals and their trust and heft and personality put me in mind of a slightly more taciturn version of the Florida manatees. But then again, they would never be so friendly if they didn't hope that I'd produce food from somewhere. We also did a quick snorkel on close by reef called No Name (!), which looked like a gorgeous dive, a wall that dropped off vertically to maybe 30m, deep blue water beyond it, schools of unicornfish and anthias everywhere, the occasional shark patrolling -- that sense of excitement, what will I see next, was palpable and rather different from the tens of dives I had done counting foraging bites (sometimes in Chinese and Malay to keep myself awake).
Edit 4/5/07: Back in Cambridge! Woo. As promised here are a few more photos. I write this at 6:45 am -- jetlag always makes me feel virtuous coming this way.
The wall on the outside edge of the north tip of No. 10 Ribbon Reef:
A couple of fish faces.
Goodbye Lizard!
2 comments:
Your pictures look great! Send the rest to me soon. See you in a month's time
Pics are very cool! That reef looks v nice indeed. Makes me want to go pick some coral (for genetics you understand, not for general coral destruction).
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