The Yongala Revisited/Turtle Safari

A few weekends ago (sorry for the delay in posting) we had a four day weekend.  As we had been going and going and going every other weekend, we decided to hang back in Townsville for the first half and then go back to Ayr to do our makeup dive on the Yongala.  For Lindsay, Saturday was a "I am so tired of having 1,000,000 things on my to-do list and damn it one of these days I'm gonna take a Saturday and just finish some of these things" kind of day.  For me it was a "Wow Lindsay looks focused, I should just stay out of her way and let her go while at the same time performing the shopping duties and trying my hand at creating a delicious Malaysian meal for her to eat at the end of an ardous and productive day" kind of day.  Both went according to plan.  While she finished cards, paperwork, emails, work, etc., I slaved away over a hot stove juggling spices and coconut milk.  When the day had come to an end we went for a nice run and then sat down to a spicy meal of chicken rendang with a side of marinated unripe mangoes.  It was great.  After dinner we went to the BCC cinema, bought our tickets (we get discounted tickets with our Billabong Sanctuary membership so they're only $9 instead of $14) and watched 2012...which was AWSOME.
 
While on the subject of good food, I should mention that we have been expanding our world view when it comes to wines.  Before coming to Oz, we pretty much drank Cabernets if we wanted red and Pinot Grigio if we wanted white.  Since arriving, we have tried some amazing Sauvignon Blancs from New Zealand, and some Shirazes from South Australia.  There is so much good wine here it is amazing.

Sunday we listened to the Arizona-Cal game.  Yet another unlucky bounce for us.  This sure is the year of the bounce.  One off a foot (Washington), one off a lineman (Cal), and one off the goalposts.  After the game we packed up and headed an hour south to Alva Beach to camp the night before diving.  We ate a delectably greasy dinner at the Food Shack and then retired to the Alva Beach RV park, home of the Gun's (boys) and Roses (girls) toilets, to camp out for the night.  We found a nice spot far enough away from the numerous palm trees and their potentially lethal bombs of death (i.e., coconuts).  All over the campground there are signs stating "please do not camp under the palms, deadly coconuts above."   In case you did not know, it is a commonly held belief of Australians as well as the web that "there have more people in Australia have been killed by coconuts than crocodiles" and "you have a better chance of getting killed by a coconut falling on your head than being attacked by a shark."  This threat, after some web research, I have determined to actually be false. 

Here is an excerpt from a shark attack statistic website:

Article by Dr. Peter Barss in the Journal of Trauma entitled "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts." (The article received an Ig Nobel Prize, given annually at Harvard by the editors of the Annals of Improbable Research in recognition of research that "cannot or should not be replicated." The award was presented in 2001, notwithstanding that the paper had been published in 1984. ( nine injuries in Papua New Guinea due to falling coconuts, none fatal. Barss notes that a coconut palm tree commonly reaches 25 meters in height, that a coconut can weigh two kilograms or more, and that a two-kilogram coconut falling 25 meters would have a velocity of 80 kilometers per hour on impact and a force of as much as 1,000 kilograms. Several victims suffered fractured skulls, were rendered comatose, etc. When we read the article, it said 9, not a 150! He provides an anecdotal account of one such death and in a separate paper estimates that over a four-year period five deaths in his hospital's service area were related to coconut palm trees (including climbers falling out of them). A recent report (Mulford et al, "Coconut Palm-Related Injuries in the Pacific Islands," ANZ Journal of Surgery, January 2001), which describes itself as "the largest review of coconut-palm related injuries," also reports no deaths and on the question of mortality merely cites Barss.

We woke up the next morning relieved to be alive.  After a scrumptous brekky of PB & J we headed down to the dive shop to check in.  Everything went according to plan and we had a wonderful 2 dives.  We saw a large grey nurse shark and a handful of beautiful sea snakes.  The visability was better than the last time we dove.

We returned to land, got in the car and drove north.  About 30K south of Townsville we took a turn and again headed for the coast.  We met up with one of our good friends Andrea (the biologist) and from there continued to AIMS, the Australian Institute Marine Science.  We had signed up to participate in a little ground breaking sea turtle research.  I was thrilled to feel like a real field biologist following in the footsteps of Jane Goodall and Jaques Coustaeu. We would be walking a beach at dusk, hoping to spot female sea turtles emerging from the sea to lay their eggs in the nearby dunes.  We spent a good 3 or 4 hours on the beach, but were not lucky enough to see any sea turtles.  Apparently we weren't the only unlucky ones though, because the groups from the previous three nights didn't get to see any either.  I did get some great night shots with my Nikon (and tripod of course).  But after about 10pm or so, we all called it quits and headed back to Townsville.