In Which - Let's Be Honest - I Basically Brag A Lot

So after a very long night of packing (trying to shove everything I needed for ten days into one backpack that would weigh less than 25 lbs), we woke up bright and early and took taxis to a tiny part of the airport called “Reef Watch”. I’d never flown on a tiny plane before, and these were some tiny planes!

Only six people fit, including the pilot:

I was feeling nauseous from the time I woke up, and they took my backpack before I could take my motion sickness pills, so it was not a huge surprise when I got sick on the plane. But that aside, it was a pretty cool flight. It was cloudy and windy so there were a lot of big bumps and stomach-flipping drops, like a roller coaster but way higher up. It was weird because those didn’t make me feel ill, just the general flying. But the best part was the views:

We went into the clouds for a bit and when we came out it was to this:

We all agreed we could practically hear David Attenborough’s voice saying “The Great Barrier Reef…” like in Planet Earth. Then we saw our island home for the next ten days:

We touched down at the beautiful Lizard Island Airport:

And drove over to the research station side of the island. We’ve got a nice beach house with a huge porch and a huge kitchen, etc. etc. My favorite part was that we kicked off our shoes before we climbed up on the porch and I haven’t put them back on yet. All the paths around here are made of soft sand and in front of every entrance to every building is a tub of water to step in which controls the sand in the research facilities and the houses. So far every day (and all the days after this) the schedule goes something like this:

7:00am Breakfast

8:00am Snorkeling – this is the time when we do our individual projects (which we’re still working on designing now) It usually goes until something like 10:30 or 11 (including boat ride to and from the reef)

11:30am Lecture

12:30pm Lunch (although I have missed this the past two days due to internetting)

2:30pm More snorkeling, to see whatever we talked about during lecture, usually until 4:30 or 5.

Then dinner and working on whatever we need to work on. It’s basically amazing. Witness:

Those are just from yesterday! I haven’t uploaded the pictures from today yet, and I didn’t take my camera for part of it. I bought a cheap underwater digital camera, and I love it! The picture quality isn’t that great, and a lot of them are sort of blurry, but it’s much better than the crappy film one I had before.

I haven’t managed to see any cephalopods yet (some other people in my group saw an octopus and a cuttlefish/squid thing. Jealous!) and I also missed the sea turtle people saw, but I have seen: the two rays pictured (the one that looks like a shark is actually a ray-thing…sort of a link between them, they are closely related), plus one today, tons and tons of clams, starfish, brittle stars, plus, you know, coral x a zillion. Oh and a black-tipped reef shark!

Today on the second snorkel trip my partner (Katherine) and I were making up all kinds of ridiculous hand signals so we can talk underwater, mostly for fun. Then, before we started snorkeling we were taking underwater pictures of each other making the hand signals. I had just done the one for shark (I will post this picture when I get it from her) and I looked down, and there one was! It was so cool! No pictures, though.

Darren, the coral reef teacher guy, has been encouraging us to touch things on the reef, which is still a really really foreign concept to me. It’s been pretty much drilled into my head that you never touch things on the reef, but he says you can’t learn if you can’t touch, so I’ve been doing it a little bit, but it still makes me feel awkward – like either I’m going to kill the coral or something is going to kill me. Clams are fun to play with, though, especially the giant ones.

That evening we went for a walk on the beach at sunset:

The weather hasn’t been great, it’s been a bit cloudy, sometimes rainy, and a lot windy. Not great for snorkeling, although it’s pretty cool having the front of your body submersed in water and rain on your back.

Currently we are watching Finding Nemo in the classroom. In the middle of the movie one of the researchers staying here came in and sat in the back, which made me happy. This movie is much more entertaining when we see those things every day, and when I’ve been to Sydney!

In other news: I am going to Western Australia to study dolphins for the month of April! It was finalized and I booked the plane ticket today. I leave in ten days. I am terrified and also really excited. Anyway, the movie is over and everyone is booking it out of here so I have to sign off and I’ll put this online tomorrow. I miss all of you! Especially you, parents, especially after watching that movie! Love you!

P.S. Since I wrote this last night (ie during the snorkel this morning – when the weather was basically perfect) what I have seen has increased dramatically. We saw:

A moray eel:

An octopus!!!! (my life is basically complete now):

And we saw a cleaning station (little cleaning wrasses cleaning huge sweetlips, even inside their mouths and gills), an algal farm (some fish actually farm algae and will tend to it and chase others away from their farm), another ray, and we chased about six squid around the water. I didn’t get pictures of the squid but I got a really really short video. I’ll see if I can upload it. Today was the best day. I saw cephalopods! I am the happiest Karis.

Sorry, I’m done bragging now. Love you!