Day 138

As of Friday night, I am back in the States!  My awesome mother greeted me at the airport with cookie dough and a thermos of milk.  I hit a Taco Bell within 24 hours of re-entering the country.  I've eaten JIF peanut butter, spicy jerky, real Doritos, Reeses cups and Tagalongs.  Life is good in the USA.

But back to Australia, and my lovely last week on a liveaboard boat.  If this experience made one thing perfectly clear to me, it's this: some people are not made to go on boats.  I and another volunteer spent the whole first night out on the cold, wet dive deck floor because we were so violently ill.  I recovered, but he spent the entire next day in bed (literally the entire day--we had to send people periodically to make sure he was still breathing) and was flown back to the mainland the day after that.  But I persevered, took a crap-load of seasickness meds, and actually had a really good time!

The difference between this liveaboard and my last one was mainly in location.  Last time I was with Deep Sea Divers Den on their boat Oceanquest, which sticks to the outer reef sites close to Cairns, like Arlington Reef.  (See the dive flag next to Cairns on the map?  Yep, right about there.)  This week I went out with Mike Ball Dive Expeditions on their boat Spoilsport, and we went waaay up to Lizard Island.  We hit up Ribbon Reef #10, Cod Hole, North Horn and Osprey Reef.  How far is it from Cairns to Lizard Island?  About 10 hours on relatively rough (for me) seas.  We made this trip on the first night, which is why I spent the night vomiting out on the dive deck.

But after I got over the horrible mal de mer the trip got much better!  (Everything is better when you don't feel like you're dying.)  The food was delicious, the diving was awesome, and everyone on the boat was really nice.  Until they discovered how ticklish I am, anyway.

Without further ado, here are some of my photos!  Not all of them are fantastic photos but try to at least appreciate how cool the fish are, and how fun their scientific names are to pronounce.

A blackback butterflyfish, Chaetodon melannotus.

A Forster's or freckled hawkfish, Paracirrhites forsteri.

A parrotfish!

Still don't know what this guy is.  Some kind of grouper, I'd wager?

My first dive on the boat didn't start off well--I was underweighted, and it took me three attempts (each time adding more weight) to sink.  And when I finally was weighted properly, my buddy realised that he never put his weight belt on at all.  We got down on the fourth try and had a lovely dive, and I still have no idea how much weight I need in kilograms.  Seriously, how hard would it be to label the weights?

A pink anemonefish, Amphiprion perideraion!  (Only one kind of anemonefish is a clownfish, and it's not this one.)

More pink anemonefish.  These guys are mauve-ish with a white dorsal fin and one white stripe behind the eye.

More blackback butterflyfish.

A yellow longnose butterflyfish, Forcipiger flavissimus.

A beautiful six-banded angelfish, Pomacanthus sexstriatus.

A saddled butterflyfish, Chaetodon ephippium.

A Celernia starfish, I think.  Isn't it pretty?  I like starfish because I can poke them and move them and everybody's fine.

I don't know what's in these but I'd put my money on 'slimy.'  Cool shape though!

Two more six-banded angelfish.  Angelfish mate for life!

An orange-lined triggerfish (Balistapus undulatus) from above.

That's a male ribbon eel!  They're tiny and I never could have spotted it myself.

Ribbon eel up close!  Too bad it's not a very good photo.  :(

That's enough for today--I'm still jet-lagged and I need some sleep.  But tomorrow I'll post photos of the shark feeding and maybe some photos of a giant potato cod trying to eat my hair.  Don't laugh, it was scary!

Cheers,

Ashton

Day 132

I couldn't help myself--I had to go back and try to measure that orb weaver I found yesterday.  Armed with a ruler and sellotape, I trekked back out into the rainforest alone.  The spider was busy eating lunch, some type of beetle, I believe.  More spider photos!

Yum yum?

Omnomnom.

Look at all those pesky scavenging males.

I taped the ruler to a stick and held it up as close as I could to the spider.  I even hit the web a few times, so this is really right next to the spider.  I then copied, pasted, and opaqued sections of the ruler from each photo to give an accurate measurement.

Body length is 2 inches in this photo, but the spider is tilted--the body is actually a bit closer to 2.5 inches, I estimate,
but for the purposes of this experiment we'll stick with 2 inches.

The first two segments of the leg measure out to exactly 2.5 inches, and the third segment is 1.5 inches.
That's a 4-inch long leg, ladies and gents.

So with a 2-inch long body and 4-inch long legs, and noting that the legs are basically all attached in the same place, this spider is a minimum of 8 inches long.  However, due to the spider's tilted position and not-so-straight legs, I think it's safe to say this gal is a bit bigger than that.  I'm sticking with my estimate of 10 inches!

Also, I saw a few sulfur-crested cockatoos.

Do those eyes remind anyone else of the eyeball candies that ice cream places stick on kids' cones?

I really don't understand why people like these things as pets, they're obnoxiously loud and their eyes are scary!

After my scientific experiment, I headed over to the aquarium to pick up my bright-yellow crocs (I love those things, but they're so ugly that I never get to wear them anywhere!) and took a few shots of Snappy, our resident crocodile.  He's a baby, and he thinks he's a ferocious predator.  Adorable!

He likes to sit at the front and watch you--probably thinking about eating you.  Awww.

Weird double vision.

Snappy's itty-bitty baby teeth!

Looking more like a real predator now.

Crocodile eyes are pretty cool.  They have two sets of eyelids:
a clear set to see underwater, and a normal set to close their eyes.

Look at that eye!  Makes me want to sing "Eye of the Tiger" for some reason.

I've started packing everything up, taking down all my decorations, and making bags of trash and donations.  You never really realise how much stuff you've got until you try to fit it all into two suitcases.

I leave for my liveaboard in two days, so I probably won't post anything new until I come home.  I promise lots of neat pictures of underwater stuff!  :)

Cheers,
Ashton

Day 131

Almost everyone I know has left, and for the past few days I haven't been able to muster up the enthusiasm to go do things on my own.  But today I vowed to stop being such a waste of life and make the most of my last few days in Cairns!

I was initially going to have a beach day, but sleeping on the beach still felt like a waste of life.  Plan B was hiking.  I grabbed my camera and donned my new explorer hat (which is pretty snazzy, might I add) and headed out into the forest with the intention of scaling a mountain.  Unfortunately, I vastly underestimated the effects of humidity in the rainforest.  I'd emptied my liter of water after an hour and wisely decided to head home after that.

On the plus side, I found lots of very cool stuff on the trails today!  The highlight of my hike: a GIGANTIC orb weaver spider.  Now, I know I've shown you orb weavers before, and yeah, they were big.  But this one kicks those other orb weavers to the curb.  I could scarcely believe my own eyes, this thing so huge.  This spider was at least 8 inches, but I'm gonna estimate it at 10 inches.  I have half a mind to go back tomorrow with my ruler, tape it to a stick, and hold it up for the camera just to prove it.

Warning: massive nightmare-inducing spiders ahead.

Hello, gorgeous!

See the little spiders?  Those are the males.  They just kinda sit around, eating her leftovers until she's ready to mate.
And then they die.  Not a very exciting life, mate, sorry.

There's those beautiful colours.

I had to duck underneath the web to get the spider's underside.  This web is easily 6 feet across and 4 feet
tall, but I had a nice clearance of about 4 feet.  

Orb weavers often build their webs in the gap between two trees.

See the spider?  Just left of the center?  That spider is the same distance as the skinny tree on the right edge of the photo.
THIS SPIDER IS HUGE.

I think I accidentally hit the web when I ducked back onto the trail.
Whoopsie daisy.  (I'm lucky I survived!)

This spider is bigger than my face.

Beautiful in a kind of terrifying way, don't you think?

But that's not the only spider I found today!  I found a huge communal web of dome tent spiders, too!  The web was so large and thick that I spotted it from about 20 feet away and had to make my own path to get a closer look.  There were about 20 spiders in there.  I think it's getting close to their breeding season because they're all bigger and fatter than I'm used to seeing them.

They have lovely patterns on their backs.

Pretty!

That tiny one is a male.  The size difference isn't quite as great as that of the larger orb weavers, but they
lead basically the same life: wait, eat leftovers, mate, die.

Sick of spiders?  Don't worry, I also found some other nice, somewhat-less-scary bugs.

This appears to be a stinkbug.  It's roughly 5 times the size of the ones in the States.
(No, I did not squish it to be sure.  I know you were wondering.)

And these aren't quite bugs, but whatever, they're cool.

I got a bird photo!  This guy was fluttering around while I was photographing the dome tent spiders.
I don't know what it is yet, Will (my bird expert) is gone.  :(

This is a tadpole, I think.  Except that it's about 5 times bigger than any tadpole I've ever seen.  I want to catch it!

And Ulysses butterflies, which are the Queensland tourism emblem.  They're quite pretty.  I didn't realise what I was photographing at first, because this is what I was seeing:

Meh, kinda boring.

And then this popped up on my camera:

Whaaaaat?  When did that happen?

As far as I can gather, the flash would scare the butterfly into opening its wings, only the movement was too quick for me to see.  Good thing my camera is faster than me!

This isn't pixelation.  This is the actual pattern on the wings.  Photos like this are why I love my telephoto lens:
they let you see things not possible with the naked eye.

The blue is very brilliant, and these guys can be spotted from quite a distance.

I guess you're okay, Ulysses.  But I still don't like your proboscis, it freaks me out.

After returning from my hike, I swung into town to pick up a few more souvenirs, grab some sushi (gotta get cheap sushi while I still can!) and run errands.  I finally found a new plastic cover for my dive computer--it's a tiny piece of plastic, just a millimeter or two thick, and yet it cost me $25.  I also spent my $30 theater gift card on snacks for my flight, since I didn't want to see any of the movies out right now.  I even ran into Gigi, one of the chefs from my liveaboard trip, on the street--it was his last day in Cairns, so I'd definitely call that lucky.  Now it's time to start packing!  Yikes.

My 21st birthday is in four days!  Unfortunately, nobody celebrates Thanksgiving here, and I'll be on a  dive boat for the big day, which means no drinking.  But I trust that I'll have plenty of folks ready to help me celebrate when I get home!  :)

Cheers and see you all soon,

Ashton

P.S.  Scroll down for lace monitor lizard photos and video!  I forgot to link to them on facebook but they're pretty cool.