Lizard Island Part II

Our first day off here on Lizard, after a rather unexpectedly successful first week, i.e. we are actually on track. Perhaps having gone through the vagaries of last season I am now simply a little hardier and less liable to let things get me down, but in truth there has been very little to do so thus far. This is a rather pleasantly surprising state of affairs -- I feel I must savour it whilst it lasts, before the inevitable big problems kick in (they didn't do so till after the first week last time either... but fingers crossed). I'm absolutely sure at least something is going to go badly pear-shaped at some point, it probably wouldn't be a field season if it didn't, but I'll jump that hurdle when I get to it.

Notables so far:
- A tiny little squid that jumped onto our boat and lay in the middle of it turning very red and looking rather upset. I put it back in the sea but didn't see whether it survived or got chomped.
- A couple of schools of similarly quite tiny little squid hanging about under our boat
- A really large juvenile harlequin sweetlips -- for divers these are the spotty ones which swim in this totally bizarre flamenco dancery way. This one was about 15cm long!
- A green treefrog that lives in our bathroom. He sits on a shelf next to the sink, and occasionally in the packet of new loo rolls. Sometimes in the day he wanders out in search of food I guess, but mostly he sits and watches us brush our teeth. I've found him in the shower cubicle every so often as well, making it a neccessity to ensure one is not cooking frog before turning on the hot water.
- A boat breakdown as we were trying to move from one study site where we'd decided the current was too strong for comfort to another -- rather than not being able to start the boat, for a while we couldn't stop! I had absolutely no control over the throttle, could neither speed it up nor slow it down, trying to put it into neutral resulted in an insane revving noise and general unhappiness, so we drove at this rather compulsory speed back to the station -- at least I could still steer the thing -- and managed to switch it off just off the station, from where we got towed back by our gallant rescuers and switched to another boat. The second one wouldn't start between dives either, so we had to do two dives at the same site, but we somehow managed to get home when we were done. The drama! Later on in the day when we were heading out on the fixed first boat (turned out its throttle cable had broken -- a first in 19 years of the station's maintenance officer's tenure here) I rather belatedly realised that we were very low on fuel and by the time we had refueled it would have been such a short dive we gave up. It was just... one of those days! Much of fieldwork is learning how to deal happily and flexibly with uncooperative weather, currents and broken down boats I think...
- Several turtles coming up for air seen from our boat.
- No sharks at all! Rather odd.
- No crocodiles, which I have no problems with whatsoever.
- Cold water. At 24-25 degrees this may not sound too bad to some but being immersed in this for up to 80 minutes barely moving because you are watching a little fish that moves all of about 10 metres over the dive doesn't help. At the moment I am wearing a LOT of neoprene. Well not precisely at this moment as it is enough neoprene to fairly quickly induce heat exhaustion on land and also as sexy as wetsuits are I don't think much of them as fashion statements, but you get the idea.
- Great weather, after a first few very windy and rainy and generally mucky days. In contrast today it is blazing hot and about 5 knots wind (a nice little breeze). My days off always have gorgeous weather and I am never out making the best of it diving!

I'm settling back in -- it's the early days that are probably the easiest, but life here is good. We even had popcorn and beer whilst watching Crash (new additions to the somewhat limited film library!) last night, followed by our traditional day-off pancakes this morning. Yum.