Jeremy in Australia

Surfing at Spot X and Diving at Byron Bay

2009-11-20T10:01:00.002+11:00

I'll have some writing up soon but here are some pictures for now:

Remote Area Dive Dive/Camp Safari to Orpheus and Pelorus Island

2009-11-17T14:14:00.002+11:00

The weekend after spring break was our dive trip with Remote Area Dive to the Palm Islands. The group was Alex, Kevin, Charlie, Jared, and me. Andrew had to drop out because of lack of funds, and Steve was actually in the hospital for three days after getting bit by a spider so he couldn’t go either. Still, we had a good group and enough people to get a sweet discount. Alex, Kevin, and Charlie were even able to get their Advanced Open Water Certification for only 50 bucks. Not bad.

Christmas Tree Worms

Basket Star

If you want to read my full log of the dives you can do it here:

The short version is that the trip was a lot of fun. We did six dives over two days (including a night dive), and camped on one of the islands at night. The coral at the Palm Islands was like nowhere else I had ever seen on the Great Barrier Reef. It wasn’t that the coral cover was outstanding (it was pretty good), but the diversity and different types of coral on the reefs was really cool. We were seeing coral and things that I didn’t even know what they were. It’s amazing how different the reefs can be even within one reef system like the Great Barrier Reef. Highlights of the dives were tons of nudibranchs, basket stars, thousands of jellyfish, an octopus, lobsters, a “bug”, a whitetip reef shark, a scrawled filefish (one of my favourite fish), a juvenile boxfish, a sea turtle, a couple juvenile lionfish, a wobbegong, and A GIANT CUTTLEFISH!!! I’ve been dying to see one of those since I’ve been here and finally we spotted one. Jared and I made a good buddy team pointing stuff out to each other, and we both had the best dives we’ve ever done in terms of breath control and conserving air. We even lasted a full 60 minutes on one dive, which is the longest bottom time I’ve ever had. Anyway check out the ScubaRadio site for more info on the dives and for sure take a look at the rest of the pictures because there are some pretty good ones.

Dive Buddy Jared

Giant Cuttlefish! It's amazing how much it changed its color and texture. Check out the video:

Heaps of jellyfish in the water.

And of course, Rocky Balboa:

GOANNA

2009-11-17T14:13:00.002+11:00

I left out something from the Cape Trib trip because I thought it was cool enough to have its own post and pictures. Within five minutes of setting up our tents, we heard some rustling around in the forest on the side of the camp. It was definitely big, so we were pretty intrigued and went over to investigate. It turned out to be a monitor lizard (goanna) that was a good 5 feet long. Seriously the thing was huge, it looked like a dinosaur. Walked just like a komodo dragon too, it was really cool. Naturally we chased it and it climbed up a tree. Turns out it hung around all week, and basically every time we came back to our camp it was laying around our tent basking or crawling through our neighbours’ trash. I’m guessing it likes to hang around there and roots through people’s garbage for food. Definitely one of the cooler wild animals I have seen though.

Cape Spring Break Part 2: Camping in Cape Tribulation

2009-10-14T09:23:00.004+11:00

Since we returned from our field trip on a Wednesday we still had a good four and a half days of break left. Alex, Kevin, and I had plans to pick up a car Wednesday afternoon and make the 7.5 hour trip up to Cape Tribulation. Cape Tribulation is where the rainforest meets the reef, and is the only place in the world that has two World Heritage areas in the same location (the Wet Tropics and the Great Barrier Reef). After getting pack from the field trip and realizing we didn’t have any food, beer, or coolers to hold them (let alone any camping equipment yet) we decided to spend Wednesday getting supplies and wake up at 3 am and make the drive up. The drive was uneventful and went quickly because everything north of Cairns was absolutely beautiful. We set up camp at our beachside campsite—me in my $12 dollar 1.5 person tent and Kevin and Alex in their borrowed mansion 4 person tent complete with fold out spa. The first day we spent most of the time hanging out on the beach (a 25 second walk from our tents) and snorkelling out on the reef. The rainforest really does go right up to the beach, its amazing to be swimming in the ocean and see mountain jungle right behind the beach. We also did a short 2 mile hike in the rainforest on a track near our site. Didn’t see anything too noteworthy but it was still pretty cool.

The beach at our campsite

Reef to Beach to Rainforest

Exploring the jungle

That night we decided to go back to the hiking track with our headlamps to try to see if we could find some cool stuff at night. Maybe not the best decision. Something about being in the middle of the jungle when its pitch black and you can hear things moving all around you but can’t see them is pretty creepy. Who would have thought? Alex’s big scare came when he was attacked by some type of killer bee swarm, although I’m convinced it could have been a moth. I definitely had the biggest fright of the night when I thought I was being stealthy and sneaking up on a lizard. I was walking and had noticed my light reflect off of the eye of something sitting against a tree so went in closer to investigate. Upon closer inspection I still couldn’t figure out what it was, but it hadn’t moved so I figured it was a lizard camouflaged in to the bark. “Ha you fool, you think I can’t figure out you’re there just because I can’t see you, I’ll show you”. I went in real close to get a good look at it so I could catch it. It was only when my face was about 2 inches from the bark that the lizard came in to focus. In the form of a spider the size of my hand jumping at my face. After that we were all a bit jumpy for the rest of the night hike, but we did see some cool stuff: bandicoots, an echidna, kangaroo rats, more behemoth spiders, stick bugs, tree frogs, and lots of cane toads.

The spider that tried to eat my face

Nasty

The next day we decided to do some exploring and check out a swimming hole in the jungle that we had heard was a short walk away. Four hours and a cranky Alex later we finally got there. It was a pretty cool spot. There were tons of fish so it was cool to snorkel, and I caught a turtle. Definitely not worth walking six miles though. Regardless, we hung out for a while swimming and ate our lunches. We walked back along the beach, rock and coral hopping. This was the coolest part of the day for me because I saw an octopus and a couple moray eels come out of their hiding spots as the evening high tide was coming in.

Our pristine jungle swimming whole that we hiked 5 miles to get to

Sweet tree

Moray going for an afternoon swim

After our long Friday, Saturday was all about being lazy on the beach and a little more snorkelling. The offshore reef was pretty good, and we found the biggest Porites coral any of us had ever seen. Easily 7 meters high and 7 meters wide. A coral like that is probably a thousand years old, pretty amazing. We also saw a few good size remoras to finish up the day. Sunday we packed up early to make our drive back home. Props to Kevin for getting us home alive, he managed to drive on the left side of the road with only a few minor slip-ups. The trip overall was awesome, the area was beautiful and we saw some really cool stuff. Not to mention that we ate like kings—sausages, eggs, baked beans, beer, canned fruit, chunky soup, and wafers for every meal. Good way to spend spring break.

Spring Break Part 1 - Coral Reef Ecology Field Trip

2009-10-12T23:31:00.007+11:00

So two weeks ago I got to go for my second spring break of the year. For the first half of break I had a field trip to the Orpheus Island Research Station, about two hours north of Townsville, for my Coral Reef Ecology class. This field trip was one of the main reasons I wanted to study at JCU, because I thought it would be awesome to get some experience working out in the field in a place like the Great Barrier Reef. Can't beat that. That being said, I'm not going to lie but going into the field trip I was a little disappointed that I didn't have the whole week off and couldn't go to places like New Zealand like a lot of my friends did. Luckily though, by the end of the field trip I was really glad I did it and had an awesome time. It ended up being exactly what I was hoping.

We left for the field trip on Saturday afternoon and had all day Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday to spend on the island collecting and analyzing some field data. Each day consisted of about 3 hours of snorkeling in the morning and then 3 more hours of snorkeling in the afternoon. We did five total research exercises and investigated zonation, competition, morphology, partial mortality, and recruitment on the coral reefs off the island. We used transect lines for each of the studies and ran several replicates over different zones to see how the variables changed across different zones. I really enjoyed the research we did, it was cool to be a part of legitimate data collection. At night we analyzed all of the data and went over results, with the idea that we will pick one of the studies to write up as a field report (it ended up being competition).

Another bonus of the field trip was that Alex and I usually finished our data collection with at least 2 hours to spare, meaning that we had loads of free time to swim around and take pictures. The reefs around the island were really nice, and we saw some really cool stuff. The first day I spotted an epaulette shark, but unluckily didn't have my camera on me because we were gathering data. Other cool stuff throughout the weekend included a flathead, scorpionfish, tons of awesome nudibranchs, clownfish (although I missed out on a classic nemo shot), and a moray eel that I tried to tempt out of its hole by wiggling my finger in front of its face (I got chastised for it later).

Night time was already fun because Alex, Kevin, and I spent the time exploring the tidal flats of the island. There were dozens of baby blacktip reef sharks that came in to swim in the shallow water at night, and even more rays. We turned over coral and rocks to see what kinds of cool and weird stuff we could find. The first night I found an octopus, which was probably the highlight for me as it crawled over my foot when I blocked its path. We also found garden eels and caught mudskippers and crabs. I tried to catch a crab to throw at Alex, but karma got me when it pinched my finger so hard that I tore its arm off.

Ghost Crab

Sweet nudibranch

On the last day they took us to an area called the "clam gardens" to snorkel around for a bit. A while back there was a giant clam aquaculture site somewhere on Orpheus, and when the study was over they dumped all of the clams on this one area of the island. Years later there are now thousands of giant clams in this one area, literally lined shell to shell. Each of the clams are at least 3-4 feet big and weigh several hundred pounds. It is crazy to see nothing but giant clams as far as the eye can see, and a neat contrast to all the coral we had been studying before.

Thousands of Giant Clams

Overall, awesome trip and I definitely learned a lot about practicing research in the field. It ended up being exactly how I was hoping and we had a pretty good time.

Flathead

There were phosflourecent worms in the mud!

Brief update

2009-09-21T21:10:00.003+10:00

This past weekend I took a PADI Rescue Diver certification course on Magnetic Island. Trip plans have been changing but a lot of exciting things are coming up:

-Next week I am going on 4 day field trip to the orpheus island research station for Coral Reef Ecology, where we will be snorkeling/SCUBA diving to collect data on the coral reefs around the island
-Immediately after the field trip I am going on 4/5 day trip to Cape Tribulation with two buddies to camp on the beach, snorkel, and hike in the rainforest
-Two weeks from now is my weekend dive/camp safari to the palm islands with 6 other friends
-Three weeks from now is the 4 day backpacking and camping trip on the Thorsborne trail of Hinchinbrook Island

After that, Papa and dad come to visit and we will be doing plenty more awesome things while they are here.

I'll add some more details about the rescue course and upcoming trips soon (SO MANY RESEARCH PAPERS TO WRITE)

Catch yas

Whitsundays Pictures

2009-09-06T23:16:00.003+10:00

So I figured out how to put a slideshow in to one of these posts. I feel so much smarter now. Now I won't have to put a bunch of pictures on the actual blog. Whatever. Anyway I will start adding these in from now on, for good measure here are the slideshows for the pictures I have so far.

EDIT: Wow this actually looks way awesomer than I thought it would, wish I had figured this out earlier.

Whitsundays

Rainforest/Wallaman Falls

Yongala

Wheeler Reef 1

Wheeler Reef 2

Notes and Trips

2009-09-06T23:00:00.002+10:00

The rest of the pictures from the Wallaman Falls and Whitsunday trips are uploaded on Picasa (http://picasaweb.google.com/ozziejeremy) and facebook, so check em out.

So far I have crossed out three major trips on the list of what I wanted to see and do while I was here:

-Dive the Yongala

-Hike Wallaman Falls

-Sail the Whitsundays

Additionally as of right now I have booked two additional trips so will be doing those soon:

-Hike the Thorsborne trail. I have a permit for October 15-19

-RAD Orpheus/Pelorus Island Dive Camp Safari. I arranged a group trip with a bunch of friends and we will be going October 10-11

Right now I am working on my plans for spring break coming up in about a month. I have a field trip the first four days for my Coral Reef Ecology class, however after that I am thinking about:

-Diving with Grey Nurse Sharks at Southwest Rocks

-Learning to Surf on the Gold Coast

I'm hoping I can fit both of these in the second half of break, so I am working on scheduling that right now. Additionally, I am looking at doing a Rescue Diver SCUBA course on September 19-20, I am just waiting on Emergency First Responder certificates so hopefully it will happen. It's gonna be a good month coming up with lots more exciting trips.

Cheers.

Sailing the Whitsundays

2009-09-06T20:40:00.006+10:00

Our boat, the "Habibi"

This past weekend I went on another trip I was looking forward to-sailing the Whitsunday Islands. The Whitsundays are known for some of the best sailing in the world, so I headed down with a group of 7 other people for a three day weekend. We were aboard the "Habibi", one of the cheaper boats in the region but it was perfect for us. On Friday afternoon we took off and spent the afternoon sailing out to our first location. We spent the afternoon and night on the boat, then woke up to spend the morning at Whitehaven Beach. Whitehaven is known as one of the top 3 beaches in the world because it has the highest silica percentage (98%) of any beach in the world. It is basically a perfect white beach. The sand is so pure that they used it to make the lenses for the Hubble Telescope.

Whitehaven Beach, the purest sand in the world

It feels like you are walking on powdered sugar it is so soft

Wobbegong shark!

After hanging out on the beach and snorkeling a bit (I found a Wobbegong shark!), we sailed some more until we got to a bay with a reef for snorkeling. The snorkeling was really good, they only drawback was having to wear stinger suits because there is a big jellyfish problem in the area. It is beginning to be the start of the box jelly season, and there are also the irukandji which are in the area year round. Luckily we had no problems because either species has the capability to kill you. I really enjoyed the snorkeling and saw some cool stuff, the highlight being a turtle which I followed around for about ten minutes.

Giant Clam

After snorkeling we sailed some more for more snorkeling at "Manta Ray Bay". I was hoping the name meant we would see a Manta Ray, but no luck. The snorkeling was still awesome though, as soon as we got off the boat a huge Maori Wrasse bigger than me was all over us. Most of the boats feed them (not to keen on that) so they are really friendly towards people in the water and come right up to you. Also saw a whitetip reef shark while snorkeling. Did some more sailing to our mooring for the night, then woke up in the morning for our last bit of snorkeling. Saw a ray, some nudibranchs, trumpetfish, and a tiny boxfish among other things this time.

This guy was bigger than me and was just as curious about me as I was of him

Nudibranch!

Giant Trevally scoping us out

After Sunday morning snorkeling we took off at about 9 am Sunday to head home, but we were intercepted by an energetic humpback whale. We spent about 30 minutes just watching him next to the boat. He did 3 full breaches (never thought I would get to see that in my life) and spent about 20 minutes laying on his side on the surface and whacking his fin on the water. It was amazing to watch and a great way to end the weekend. The trip was definitely what I was hoping it would be like, and made me wish I had my own boat and knew how to sail. It was also great to meet and hang out with some new people, and I had a real good time.

It slapped its fin and completely breached for a good half an hour

Awesome trip

Rainforest/Wallaman Falls

2009-09-06T20:06:00.004+10:00

View of the falls from the top

View of the falls from the bottom

So two weeks ago I was able to do one of my goal trips, which was to hike around Wallaman Falls. Wallaman Falls is the tallest waterfall in Australia (over 1000 feet including about a 900 foot free fall) so I was pretty excited to do this. I signed up for a weekend trip in a group of 8 people and we headed out Saturday morning.

During the day Saturday we spent most of our time exploring the rainforest and learning about the area. The Wet Tropics of Queensland are a world heritage area because they are the oldest rainforest on earth and a critical ecosystem for this area of the world. Queensland is the only place in the world with two World Heritage Areas (Wet Tropics and Great Barrier Reef). Our guide Ross was really knowledgeable about the rainforest so it was cool how much he taught us about it. We did a couple of different hikes through the rainforest, and also got to stop at some waterfalls to swim. Cool stuff. The highlight of the day was in the evening when we went down to a river to look for platypus. Platypus are extremely rare and only like 15% of Australian's or something like that have ever seen one. We were in one of the few areas of the country where you can see them on a regular basis. We ended up spending about an hour watching them and got to see a bunch. I was really surprised at how small they are-only about a foot long. For some reason I had an image of them being like 3 feet long and the size of a beaver or something. Still, it was really cool. Later that night we also did a night hike and saw bats, gliders, possums, and a ton of what they call "kangaroo rats" which are basically tiny wallabies. It was pretty neat.

Platypus! This was the best picture I could get, but we did see them consistently for about an hour

Diving through a waterfall

Sunday was the big day we got to go to Wallaman Falls, which was the highlight of the trip for me. There was viewing observations across the gorge of the falls which provided great pictures, and then we did a 2 km hike down to the base of the falls. It was really amazing as I've never seen anything near that big. We were there during the dry season, so I can't even imagine how powerful the falls must be during the rainy season. Crazy stuff. It was an awesome trip and great weekend, not only did we see some cool stuff but we also learned a lot about the area as well.

We went to a spot to look for Saltwater Crocodiles, but no luck.

Rainforest Panoramic

Panoramic of the falls

Photography Class

2009-08-29T00:31:00.004+10:00

These are the pictures I turned in for my first assignment in my photography class. There were different techniques we were required to use such as controlling depth of field, light painting, freezing and blurring motion, and all that jazz. We had to submit three sets of two photos to fit the theme "day/night" so this is what I turned in. You'll have to trust me that they look way cooler at full size/quality. I wasn't a huge fan of having to deal with themes and stuff but I think it went alright and my teacher seemed pleased. We'll see I guess..

I was kickboxing the other day with my friend and I saw a rhinoceros beetle. It was huge. And awesome.

Tomorrow I'm leaving for the weekend to go to the rainforest and Wallaman falls. The thousand foot tall highest waterfall in Australia. It's gonna be freaking awesome.

Pics

2009-08-29T00:29:00.001+10:00

The link for the rest of the photos from my diving trip is:

http://picasaweb.google.com/ozziejeremy

They are also all on facebook.

Ugh

2009-08-24T23:11:00.002+10:00

I screwed up again and put everything in backwards order. There are a bunch of new posts so just scroll down till you get to whatever you have read before. A couple posts down will explain about the SCUBA pictures.

Additional things

2009-08-24T22:47:00.004+10:00

Some more

2009-08-24T22:26:00.004+10:00

No way!

2009-08-24T21:50:00.005+10:00

Octopus!

I wrote a huge long trip report about diving this past weekend. I did it mostly for myself as a way of logging dives more than anything, but I figured maybe someone would find it interesting. It goes in to way more detail than necessary and is really long, but I liked writing it and remembering everything about the dives. Because I spent a ton of time writing it I am not going to post anything about the trip on here, but feel free to check out the trip report at:

http://media.clicktoboat.com/blogs/jeremybender

Loggerhead turtle

So I uploaded all of the pictures from my trip to Picasa Web Albums or whatever it is called. I was really pleased with how they turned out, I got some really good ones. However, for some reason when I uploaded them the quality went down the crapper. So I am pretty pissed off. For now I am going to put a few videos and just a couple of my favorite pictures on here until I can upload the pictures somewhere else, probably facebook I guess. If you don't have facebook and want to see the pictures just let me know (put it in the comments or something) and I'll send you the link to the crappier versions of them.

Loggerhead Turtle

Barracuda!

GIANT Trevally

Banded sea snake eating a fish!

EDIT: The pics are on facebook now but I'm still not pleased with the quality that they upload. Oh well. I think it is because I did a lot of editing on the computer so maybe that screwed some things up. I kept about 150 of the pictures I took that turned out pretty good, my favorites are in the next couple posts so you can get the gist of it. At least the videos are pretty sweet.

Rugby

2009-08-24T10:45:00.004+10:00

Last week I went to a rugby game with a bunch of friends. The stadium is only about a 30 minute walk or so from campus, but they also run a bus directly from campus to the stadium so we hopped on that (not knowing it would cost us 8 dollars round trip). Townsville's rugby team is called the Cowboys and they are having a pretty decent season this year; right now they are in 6th place or something like that. The Cowboys also have the best player in the world, Jonathon Thurston, so that was really exciting. The team we were playing was in 2nd place at the night so it was a pretty big game.

We got seats in the lawn area for only 10 bucks which was nice because we got to sit on the grass wherever we wanted and move about as we wished, so I actually preferred it to sitting in the actual stands. The lawn seating areas are also directly behind the end zones (probably not what they are actually called) so we got to be really close to the action as well. Rugby is probably one of the simplest sports to learn because there are very few rules. It is really an awesome game and a really good spectator sport because the action is non-stop and it is very violent. There was a 20 minute stoppage at one point in the game because a player got knocked out and had to be carted off on a stretcher.

The game itself was pretty close, the Cowboys dominated the first half but ended up sucking the second half so the Bulldogs came back to win. Our group got lucky in that most of the tries were scored on our end of the field so we got to see all the action.

It was too quick for me.

I got back from the weekend dive trip out to Wheeler Reef/Yongala last night, it was an amazing trip. I finished up editing all my photos just now, so I'll have those up by tonight. Pretty cool stuff.

For good measure this is a picture of me failing a backflip attempt off of the rope swing.

Yo

2009-08-11T16:13:00.002+10:00

So I added a bunch of stuff today, if you're worried about reading things in the right order start from the bottom.

WOOOOO! DIVING! WOOOOO!

2009-08-11T16:11:00.002+10:00

So I knew about this even before I wrote the previous post but I am too excited about it so I kept it separate. Last week I signed up for the dive club here at school and booked a trip out to the Yongala and Wheeler Reef. WOOOOOOO! But seriously I’m so pumped about it. The trip is August 21-23, we leave Friday night so that we wake up Saturday morning at Wheeler Reef and do 3 dives that day, then boat to the Yongala overnight and do two dives at the Yongala on Sunday. Since it is with the dive club through school the price was really good and I have like 6 or 7 friends going with me so it’s going to be a great time. I honestly can’t wait to get out there and dive. Wheeler Reef is supposed to be amazing and obviously the Yongala is phenomenal. Can’t wait to take pictures of everything. Like I said before it is whale season so we might even end up diving with whales at some of the sites. I am guessing I am going to love it so much that I will probably do a few more Yongala trips before the semester is over. There is a grouper at the wreck called VW because it is bigger than a car that I will try to get a picture with. Can’t wait.

As I was writing this I remembered a conversation my friend and I had with a guy from the dive shop on Magnetic Island. We were asking him about the Yongala wreck and how we read that everybody on board died. We asked him if you could still see the bones and stuff. He got really weird about it and said that you are not allowed to look for the bodies. A couple years ago authorities went down and stuffed all the remains inside of the ship where you can’t get to. Apparently there is a huge fine and you get arrested if you try to get in there. He told us National Geographic went down a couple years ago and that they dove deep to get to all of the bodies and film everything. When they came up they were arrested and had all of their film confiscated. Don't know how much I believe it but I thought it was a pretty cool story anyway. No matter what, it's going to be awesome.

My Trip List

2009-08-11T16:00:00.007+10:00

So when I am bored or have free time during the day, instead of writing on here like I should I spend my time researching places I want to see or things I want to do while I am here. Obviously it is unrealistic for me to do everything on this list because I won’t have enough time or money, but I think I’ll get to do the majority of stuff. Here is what I have right now.

Skydive or bungee jump in the rainforest: I think I will do this when I head up to Cairns for my SCUBA trip after the semester. They have skydives from 12,000 feet where you free fall for 60 seconds and land on the beach. I have always wanted to try skydiving so this I am leaning towards that over bungee jumping, although I think bungee jumping would be way scarier so might be more fun.

Sea Kayak Magnetic Island: They do sea kayak tours every morning and its supposed to be awesome. They last like 4 hours and tour the whole island so I think it would be a great way to get my bearings of where the reefs and things are. There is an entire half of the island that is uninhabited and you can’t even get to unless you have a boat so it will be cool to go back there. One of my friends and I also have a goal of getting to that backside by bushwacking or rock climbing above the coast. The highest mountain on the island has no trails going to it so we are going to find a way to get up there somehow. This time of year Humpback whales are migrating through and you can see them out in the bays every day, so I want to get out there and kayak soon.

Hinchinbrook Island: This is a national park about an hour north of our school. It has one of the best backpacking trails in the country (Thorsborne Trail) that takes 4 days to do and you have to register way in advance. Right now I am thinking about doing it during my mid-semester break.

SCUBA dive the Yongala Wreck: The Yongala wreck is one of the top 5 dives in the world. Seriously, look it up. I am usually more interested in marine life than wreck dives but the cool thing about this dive is that it is special because of the marine life. The wreck is like an oasis in the dessert so everything there is abundant and freaking massive. Whales, turtles, manta rays, bull sharks, sea snakes, etc. I can’t wait. I will probably do this a couple times while I am here because the dive charters leave from Townsville.

SCUBA dive with Grey Nurse Sharks at Southwest Rocks: In Australia they call Sandtiger Sharks Grey Nurse Sharks. I worked with these at the zoo and they would be awesome to dive with. The diving at Southwest Rocks is really cool because it is a cave that you swim through and usually there are about 30-40 Grey Nurse Sharks (they are endangered here) at the site. They are a really slow-moving shark so they literally float within inches of you while you dive. Check it out: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afeTqlRtzWE)

Learn to surf: There is a cool program called mojo surf that does surfing/camping trips where they teach you how down on the Gold Coast of Australia that is world famous for surfing. I definitely can’t leave here without learning.

Hike to Wallaman Falls: Wallaman Falls is the biggest waterfall in Australia and about an hour north of our school. Its over 1000 feet high. I may be heading out there in two weeks but am not certain yet.

Sail the Whitsunday Islands: Best place in the world to sail. There are 70 or so islands and you can have a crew take you to all the different islands for snorkelling, camping, etc. A huge group of us are going to do this one weekend.

Dive/Camp Safari to Orpheus and Pelorus Island: There is a place called Remote Area Dive in Townsville that does a 3 day dive trip out to these two islands for diving on the Great Barrier Reef. You also get to camp on the islands at night. Orpheus Island is also the place where I will be going for my 4-day field trip for Coral Reef Ecology

Cape Tribulation: This is a world-heritage wet tropics area North of Cairns. Where the real rainforest is. Its supposed to be beautiful and I want to hike it.

SCUBA dive Byron Bay: Byron Bay is supposed to have some of the best diving in Australia because it is a marine preserve in between the tropical ocean/Great Barrier Reef and the deep Southern Ocean so the species diversity is awesome.

7 Day Liveaboard on the Great Barrier Reef and the Reefs of the Coral Sea: This is supposed to be the premier diving in the entire country. I already have my trip booked and paid for after the semester is over, now it is just a matter of waiting for it to come.

I have a reservation to go here.

The nice thing about most of these trips is that I can do them in a weekend. Since I have no class on Fridays I can take off for three days weekend trips whenever I want, so most of these are definitely do-able. I don’t really care about going to Sydney or any of the big cities, and I don’t have plans to go to the outback because it is too expensive and takes too long. Hopefully I’ll start getting to do these soon!

AWESOME Weekend

2009-08-11T15:49:00.002+10:00

This past weekend we went out to the island because every month when there is a full moon they have a full moon party out on the beach on Magnetic Island that goes from 5 pm to 5 am. Most people were excited because it was a party, I was excited because it was Magnetic Island. A few of us didn’t have class on Friday so we went out to the island for the day before the party. The mission was simple: find a sweet reef to snorkel at off of the beach. We headed out hoping that visibility would be better like everyone had promised, and luckily it was this time. It helped that we came at low tide so that the reef was in even shallower water than normal. The snorkelling was really good, the coral is awesome and we saw lots of fish. I also saw the biggest lobster I have ever seen, it was freaking huge. Tons of stingrays too, I swear we saw about 50 of them throughout the afternoon. A lot of times we didn’t even see them until we had kicked them up and they were swimming away. At one point I was snorkelling in about two feet of water admiring an especially sharp 5-foot stick in the sand before I realized it was attached to a huge ray right underneath me. Bit of a shock. We also made it out to the wreck this time, which was really cool because it was not too deep to snorkel around. It was covered with coral and a pretty sweet spot. I didn’t take the camera out because the water still wasn’t clear enough for good pictures, but soon enough I’ll be able to hopefully. I’m still waiting on seeing some of the sharks that I hear hang around these reefs. The full moon party was a good time as well later that night.

Saturday was the real highlight of the weekend as I went camping with a big group about an hour north of school. There were about 15 of us, including two girls from the group I came with and a bunch of Aussies we’ve met here. Our camping spot was right on the beach, and it was an awesome place. We were out there from Saturday morning until Sunday morning hanging around the fire and screwing around in the beach. At home people mess around with their 4WD trucks in the snow and mud, here they do it on the beach. They also had a dirt bike that we got to ride around-first time I have ever done that. Learned a little bit of rugby and cricket, and got laughed at for my homerun style cricket swing. My favorite part was skim boarding. We attached a rope to one of the trucks and got towed on a skip board on top of the water, just like you would with a boat except that we were only riding on about half a foot of water. Which made it hurt if you ate it and were going pretty fast. I had a blast doing that, I was able to get up for a while a couple times but spent most of the time getting a face full of sand. At night we chilled around the fire and got to see the moon rise, something that I didn’t even know happened. We even got a little excitement when a ton of paramedics and cops went flying past us on the beach. Apparently some guys camping a little ways down were messing around in their 4WD truck and one guy fell off the back and got run over. Luckily he survived but it was a pretty bad situation. We didn’t even need a tent for sleeping, just a blanket or sleeping bag in the sand. It was great. We even caught some crabs for breakfast in the morning. I can’t think of a much better way to spend a weekend in Australia.

This and That

2009-08-11T15:47:00.001+10:00

College sports are weird here because they don’t really have any intercollegiate competitions like we do at home. Instead intramurals and club sports are pretty big, although there isn’t a great deal of variety in the sports they offer. I ended up signing up for ultimate frisbee because a bunch of my friends were doing it and I like the game. They are a little bit too serious for me and have all these strategies and different plays that they teach us, and things like that. I’d rather just run around and try to make diving catches and stuff but its still a blast because I have no problem being competitive about a game if other people are.

I also am playing intramural water polo, which I really like because it is basically fighting someone in the water with occasional attempts to score a goal. It is difficult to pick up the rules about what exactly you can and can’t do so I think some of the guys on the club team get frustrated with me (actually I know for a fact they do) but its still really fun because of how physical it is and it’s in the water. It’s also a hell of a work out. I like doing intramurals a lot because it keeps me busy and you get to meet new people.

This is a bad picture of me holding a koala.

The food here is definitely way different than what I am used to. For meals there is usually one entrée option. If you don’t like it-too bad you’re eating cereal tonight. Half of the time they run out of food halfway through a meal so that if you come late you’re screwed. Of course the other half of the time they have way too much food so you can guess what we are going to have for lunch the next day. It definitely gets really repetitive when lunch is last night’s leftovers, but usually the food at least tastes good. At the moment they are out of the doghouse a bit because it was tacos for lunch yesterday and they were awesome. Usually though, most people end up having cereal and peanut butter sandwiches as part of their dinner because there is just not enough other stuff to eat. I feel like an animal that stuffs itself to the brim when I eat because I don’t know when my next good meal will come. By the way Vegemite tastes like crap, I have no idea why anyone would want to eat that.

Catching up

2009-08-11T15:36:00.006+10:00

The last week or two has been mostly getting in a routine with classes and doing some more exploring during my free time. I really like my classes although it has been very difficult to get into school mode. I don’t know if my sense of time is still weird or I am just not prepared to have school at this time of year, but it seemed like I was falling in asleep in almost every class that first week. I have resorted to sitting in the very front row of class to keep myself awake, and I don’t mind it as long as the class is interesting I guess.

My favorite class so far (sidenote: the word favorite just came up as misspelled on my computer because I have everything set to Australian spelling) is Coral Reef Ecology. It looks like it is going to be pretty challenging and in-depth and the subject is obviously really interesting to me. For this class we also get to go on a four-day trip during one of our semester breaks out to a lab on the Great Barrier Reef. We’ll be doing a bunch of field studies on the reef out there and I’ll even be doing some scientific diving so I’m really pumped about that. Photography has also been pretty good so far, although we have to rent out the equipment way in advance so I’m kinda bummed about that because I would rather just take pictures of any cool stuff that I come across throughout the week instead of plan ahead what I want to photograph. Oh well, I’m still really pumped about what I’m learning.

Besides classes, I’ve also gone out to Magnetic Island a couple more times with friends. The first time was on a Wednesday when I didn’t have class and we wanted to check out some different bays to look for reefs off of the beach. We found an awesome one but the visibility was crap again. Everybody keeps insisting it is a freak thing for it to be so windy so I’m waiting it out for the snorkelling to get better. We did find a beach that was over run by sand bubbler crabs, which was so cool. I’m stealing from Kevin and saying check out this video (http://videos.howstuffworks.com/animal-planet/29027 -fooled-by-nature-sand-bubbler-crabs-video.htm) if you don’t know what they are. Basically in a matter of a few hours when the tide is going out thousands of these crabs and sift through all the sand to get food then pack the sand in to tiny little balls. The balls literally cover the entire beach, and the crabs are everywhere. Pretty sweet. A bunch of us also did some more hiking around and snorkelling on the island on one of the weekends. At one point we decided to try to find a shipwreck that we had heard about that was off one of the beaches. We swam out to a post we thought was marking it but couldn’t find it. When we came back in we learned from the dive shop we were about 15 feet away and just missed it. Ah well, next time.

Besides the island, we also go to the rope swing pretty often. Yeah, the one right by where I bike past a 6 foot croc everyday. It’s fun and we’ve even gone in the middle of the night. My goal is to get a backflip down off of the swing. I also did some mountain biking with my friend Matt up in to the mountains behind school. There are some awesome trails that go up there, and it is a challenge because the brakes on my bike are pretty dodgy. They do a lot of controlled burns up in the hills because it is so dry during the winter that the entire forest could be wiped out if there was a natural fire. It is really cool to watch the mountains in flames at night, and going up there during the day to see everything burned is really cool. I’m going to have to start writing things on here more regularly because I know I am forgetting a ton of stuff, but I will add things as I remember them.

Sand bubbler crabs at work

Post fire up in the mountains

I may submit this one for my photography class

Maggie Island!

2009-07-26T16:28:00.019+10:00

Yesterday a bunch of us spent the day at Maggie Island. Magnetic Island is a 15 minute ferry from Townsville and a very popular place for people from the city to go. I can understand why because it is absolutely gorgeous there. It is a very very quiet and relaxed place, and it has loads of awesome beaches, rainforest mountains, and coral reefs.

It actually looks like a brochure you would look at for some tropical island paradise. It reminds me a lot of Acadia National Park in Maine if you replace all of the pine trees with rainforest and palms, and the rocky coast of Maine with white sand beaches and crystal clear water with reefs.

They have a ton of hiking trails so we started off by getting on one of those to see where it took us. You can actually walk from one end of the island to the other if you have enough time and are motivated enough. We first stopped in a place called Geoffrey Bay because it looked like there was a reef a ways out and we wanted to check it out. Three of us ended swimming out there with mask and snorkels and the coral was amazing. In like 6 feet of water there was reef covering the entire bottom so it was right under us. It was so incredible. Unfortunately it was "choppy" (barely any waves so I can't even imagine how calm it is when there is no wind) so the visibility was not good at all and we didn't stay out too long. We talked to

a guy at a dive shop though and he said usually the vis is around 50 feet so we'll definitely be back to check it out again. He also showed us all of the best bays for snorkeling on reefs that are on the island and pointed out some shipwreck locations you can get to from shore so I'm excited to explore some more.

After the reef we chilled at some other beaches in the different bays. We then ended up doing a lot more hiking and took a trail called the forts which goes around to a bunch of old WW2 gun posts, observation towers, and things like that. Really cool and the views were amazing. Magnetic Island also has the largest population of koalas in the north and we ended up seeing one. After the hiking and the scenic overlooks we ended up at Horseshoe Bay which is the best place to watch the sunset. We hung out there all night and did some swimming and barbecuing on the beach. I was glad to finally be able to see what all the hubub was about the island and I can't wait to get back out there again.

View of Townsville from the ferry out to the island

Geoffrey Bay

We found echidnas! They are really goofy, you can't see it in this picture but their feet are backwards. They are the only monotreme (egg laying mammal) in the world besides the platypus.

Alma Bay

These birds are all over the place and are awesome looking. They are ridiculously loud at night. I still haven't figured out what kind they are.

Found a bat in one of the forts

It was about as big as my palm.

Florence Bay I believe

I found a cuttlebone from a cuttlefish while we were snorkeling. Pretty cool. The dive shop said it was one of the bigger ones they have seen.

Sunset at Horseshoe Bay

Panoramic view from the forts overlook

Panoramic of Horseshoe Bay

Classes

2009-07-26T16:08:00.002+10:00

We figured our classes out this week. I had to do a lot of switching things around because there were so many conflicts between what I was signed up for. Since the marine science classes I wanted were technically different levels or years, they don't really design them to be taken together since regular students would not be taking them at the same time. I ended up with only 2 of the classes I though I would be in originally but its not a big deal because I like the ones I am in and my schedule is sweet.

My classes are:

-Coral Reef Ecology: This has a field trip out to the Great Barrier Reef for 4 days where we get to dive and do labs and things so it is going to be pretty awesome.

-Marine Conservation Biology

-Design and Analysis for Ecological Studies: I'm really pumped about this one because I've never done anything like this before, it is using data to create computer models for different types of ecological situations. This is the type of thing I'll be getting into if I end up doing anything with conservation for a career.

-Effective Photography: Awesome. I'm excited about this one as well, I've been wanting to take a photography class for a long time.

So with these for classes my school schedule is:

Monday 9-10 and 1-5

Tuesday 9-11 and 12-2

Wednesday 10-1

Thursday 10-12 and 2-5

Friday 3-4

Pretty sweet. Only one class on Wednesday and Friday, which means there is a lot of possibilities for three day weekend trips. I'm also free for dive club meetings which I'm excited about because they do a ton of trips. Classes start tomorrow so we are gearing up for that, meanwhile there was just an announcement that the bus for the school sponsored sunday drinking event at the tavern leaves in 15 minutes. I could get used to this place.

The strand, campus, etc

2009-07-26T15:41:00.010+10:00

So in our free time this week we've been doing a lot of exploring around Townsville. It is about a 20 minute bus ride to the city and the beach so its a pretty sweet deal. The beach here is called "the strand" and is probably about a mile long. All of the Aussies say it is a crappy beach but none of us Americans can really figure out why because it is pretty nice.

The other day one of the Australians took us around to a couple places to show us some cool spots. Behind the strand and downtown is a small mountain called Castle Hill, there is a road and a hiking path that goes to the top. It is an awesome view from the top-you can see the entire city, the beach, and the ocean. Right behind our campus is a mountain called Mount Stuart. We drove to the top of that as well and it is cool because you can see everything between campus and downtown, as well as way out into the ocean and the surrounding islands. Mount Stuart is owned by the army here so apparently everything is fenced off and there are signs everywhere saying if you try to hike up you will get shot or blown up by a land mine. Someone pointed a trail out to us that you can supposedly get up to the top from so we are going to give it a go soon.

Exciting personal accomplishments in the last few days include getting a hammock for my balcony and acquiring a bike. Sweet, I'm all set for the semester.

A sweet tree down by the strand. There are a lot of these all over, the roots like grow down from the branches then into the ground once they reach it.

View from our room balconies. Mount Stuart is to the right of the ones in this picture.

I got a hammock!

The other day when we were walking I found a preying mantis. I put it on my balcony and it stayed there for a couple days before it took off.

We were at Maggie Island yesterday and it was incredible. I am going to try to put up pictures from there soon because it was absolutely amazing.

-Jeremy

Wake up at 10, go out to eat, then do it again

2009-07-26T15:14:00.004+10:00

So in the past weeks we have spent our time meeting new people and checking out all the new places. The week before classes is called "o week" and is meant to get you accustomed to everything, but pretty much all that there was to do in terms of academic orientation things was sign up for classes and get our student ids. More than anything the first few weeks of school are all about social events to get to know everyone. The list of school-sponsored social events coming up that is posted in my dorm and in the orientation handbook reads:

-7/26: Sunday sesh! Meet for free taxis to the tavern at 3:30

-7/28: Toga party at Uni Club

-7/30: Club opening night at Uni Club

-7/31: Recession themed pub crawl. Free shuttle around to all the pubs and discounts on drinks.

-8/1: Kegs on the lawn. If you participate to represent your dorm in the cross country race that day you get a discount on your cup.

-8/7: Full moon party. Party out on the beach on Maggie Island all night until the sun comes up.

It is so different here because all of the school events are for drinking while at Maine all of the school events are put together so people will do stuff besides drink. Apparently the whole campus goes to these things here and it gets pretty crazy so it should be pretty fun.

Swimming with crocs

2009-07-20T16:10:00.005+10:00

The animals around here are something we were warned a ton about before we came. Queensland is home to something like eight of the top ten world’s most venomous snakes, spiders, and whatever else, but so far we haven’t seen anything too crazy. On the beaches here they have signs all over the place about marine stingers because box jellyfish can kill a person in seconds. During the summer all of the jellyfish are in near the coast so you can’t go in the ocean unless you are in specific areas with stinger nets. Fortunately we are here during the winter so we don’t really have to worry about it. It is still funny walking the beach and seeing bottles of vinegar all over though.

The other day a bunch of us were going down to a river near campus to meet up with a group of friends who were there swimming. They have a rope swing and dock and stuff so it’s a nice spot. On the way we got lost but we ended up at a scenic overlook spot and could see a crocodile basking on a rock in the water. It was about 6 feet long, nothing too huge but still big enough that we figured we must be at the wrong river because it must not be safe to swim with crocs. There was even an informational sign about freshwater crocodiles at the overlook, which leads to the assumption that they must be pretty common in this river. Well turns out when we do find our friends they are only about a 5 minute walk away, swimming in the same river where we saw and read about the crocs. Needless to say they were pretty surprised to hear about that. We figured it must be alright if they have a rope swing and dock set up so we spent the next hour swimming and jumping out of the tree, just making sure we had our head on a swivel. Apparently the freshwater crocs are harmless, it’s only the salties that you have to watch out for. When we were at the Rainforestation during our orientation we saw a huge saltie called “Jack the Ripper” who was probably close to 20 feet long. It was unreal. Why was he called Jack the Ripper? Well apparently he has killed all 17 females they have tried to get him to mate with.

Last night when I was walking home I heard something banging around in the garbage near the bathroom. When I went to see what it was I found an Aussie possum staring at me while chewing on a discarded orange. It was funny because the day before somebody had come back to his room to find his food rummaged through and possum sized poops all over the place. I guess we know the culprit now. I am going to leave some apple cores on my balcony and see if

they come. The other day I was out on the balcony and there was a kookaburra sitting on the balcony next door. We hear them at night, their laughs are really loud. He sat there for about 20 minutes before I decided to mess with him. I looked up their call on my computer and played it to see what would happen. As soon as it started playing his head swiveled around looking for where it was coming from, then he flew away. I successfully defended my territory.

Pictured: Inferior Kookaburra

-Jeremy

Australian squirrels

2009-07-20T15:52:00.008+10:00

There are wallabies all over campus. Kangaroos too, but not as many. At night they scare the hell out of you because you'll be walking along and some huge thing will come crashing by you at 100 miles per hour. Or 160 kilometers per hour. A lot of them have little joeys in their pouches too, it's pretty cool.

Getting Settled

2009-07-17T20:18:00.004+10:00

Edit: I put up a slideshow on the bottom of the page of some of the pictures I took diving on Tuesday. I haven't figured out how to move it up on the page or make the pictures bigger but if you click on them it should take you to the bigger image I think.

So we got in to Townsville yesterday and I am finally started to get settled. Backtracking to last Saturday I had a 12 hour layover in LAX before the flight to Australia. It was nice to be on a group flight though because everyone else there to meet and wait with. The flight to Sydney was 15 hours but it was not at all as bad as I expected it would be. Since we were flying overnight they had all of the lights off so it was really easy to sleep. It was a huge plane -- 12 seats across or something ridiculous like that. Each seat had its own TV with tons of movies and tv shows to choose from, and we got a couple of meals as well including free drinks. Once we landed in Sydney we had to transfer to Cairns, but since we were delayed leaving LAX we had to hurry through customs and only made it to the gate in time as they had already started boarding.

In Cairns we had a 4 day orientation with AustraLearn and stayed in a backpackers hostel. The orientation was a combination of doing cool stuff and sitting through boring information sessions. On Tuesday we went out to the Great Barrier Reef with Passions of Paradise to Paradise Reef and Michaelmas Cay. It was a 2.5 hour boat ride out to the reef but it was so nice to sit in the sun and the scenery was beautiful. On the way out we ran into a humpback whale and its calf so the captain cut the engine and they ended up coming to within 15 feet of the boat, it was awesome. I got to do one dive on each site. Some of the highlights include a moray eel, rays, a green turtle, HUGE mauri wrasse, giant clams, lionfish, baitballs, and countless other beautiful fish. By far the most impressive thing was the coral though. It is like something straight out of Planet Earth. I wish my pictures could do it justice. It was a great day and my new dive computer and sea sickness patches worked perfectly.

On Wednesday we went into the rainforest to a place called Rainforestation. It was pretty sweet, we started off with an introduction to aboriginal culture by learning how to throw a boomerang and play dijiridoo, then went on a military duck tour through the rainforest. They also had a mini wildlife park with Australian animals in it so we got to feed and pet kangaroos and hold a python and stuff like that. They also took our picture holding a koala so I'll have to try to figure out how to get that up. Wednesday night there was a pub crawl in Cairns so a bunch of us went on that, it took us to 7 different bars and there were deals and free drinks at each one. They had some fun games and event things that went along with it so it ended up being a good night. Thursday morning we took a four hour bus ride to Townsville to move into school.

We got here yesterday afternoon and checked into our halls (they call residence halls colleges). The campus is much different than I expected but I like it here. There are kangaroos all over campus. The university is a lot more isolated from the city than I thought it would be. I have a single room with a balcony, which is really nice. I am going to get a hammock for it as soon as I can. Since we got there in the afternoon we didn't do too much, just familiarized ourselves with the campus and the bus system going into town. This morning (Friday) we had a brief international student orientation basically telling us how to set up our online student accounts and register for classes and all that jazz. Next week is a week of orientation type activities called "o week" so there will be a lot of stuff going on then. I went into the city with some people and we checked out the boardwalk type park they have along the beach called the strand. It is about a 15-20 minute bus ride from campus but I think once I get a bike I can get there in even less than that. Might be headed back out there tonight but we'll see. Next up on the agenda for the next couple days is trying to fix all the schedule conflicts in my classes and getting a bike. I'll try to take some pictures of campus/the city in the next few days, we are probably heading out to Magnetic Island this weekend as well.

-Jeremy

Here

2009-07-17T12:10:00.001+10:00

Got to school yesterday. It's awesome. So much to get set up and registered. Hopefully I'll get internet up soon so I can update and put pictures.

Leave in 1 Day, Arrive in 3

2009-07-11T15:17:00.003+10:00

Finally finished packing and am ready to head out. I fly out of MSP tomorrow morning and get to LAX around 11 am. The flight to Sydney doesn't leave till 11 pm, but there should be plenty of other people to meet that will be on the Australia flight so that will help pass the time. Everybody on the flight is involved in the AustraLearn program like me and will be going to JCU as well, which is going to make it a lot easier to get through all of the travel. During the 15 hour flight to Sydney we also lose 17 hours of time. Once we get to Sydney we have a short layover and then a flight to Cairns where we finally arrive at around 1 pm on Monday. 50 or so hours after I left home.

Once in Cairns we have a 4 day AustraLearn orientation program to help introduce us to the country. They haven't given us all the details yet but we will get to SCUBA dive on the Great Barrier Reef, go on a rainforest tour, and visit a wildlife sanctuary among other things. Quite the way to start off the semester. And I'll actually have something exciting to put on here then. Afterwards we will bus to JCU about 4 hours away and go through a week of orientation activities at the university before classes finally start on the 27th. It is going to be nice to have free time before the semester begins to get acquainted with the new setting.

-Jeremy

My Blog for Scuba Radio

2009-07-09T06:10:00.003+10:00

In addition to maintaining this blog I will also be corresponding for Scuba Radio, a national radio program devoted to SCUBA diving. I was recently featured on the show talking about getting ready to go and introducing myself and what I will be doing throughout the semester. You can view the blog I have set up through Scuba Radio here, and I will also keep a link to it at the top of this page.

-Jeremy

Hello

2009-07-09T06:06:00.003+10:00

My soon-to-be home for the next 6 months

I will be using this blog as a way of keeping in contact with friends and family while I am away for semester in Australia. I will be studying at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia from July to December. I do not plan on writing frequent or lengthy posts but will probably use this as a way of sharing photos and brief updates of what I am up to. Townsville's current weather: 80 degrees and sunny. Four days left until I leave.

-Jeremy