That's another fine mess you've gotten me into Stanley

Established in South Australia in 1893 the Stanley Wine Company has always prided itself on the quality and reliability of its products. This philosophy has been instrumental in the Stanley cask becoming an Australian icon.

It was pretty much instrumental in making me feel decidedly under the weather today as well. To be fair, the bottle of Merlot that accompanied dinner, preceded as it was by the always risky long island iced tea, have also played significant parts in my recent downfall.

Unfortunately the body was denied the extended lie in it so sorely needs because we had a 10:00 appointment with the doctor today. As if I didn’t have enough to cope with already my body is currently being re-acquainted with Typhoid fever, the booster having become due. Our attempts to stock up on anti-malaria medicine, however, failed miserably. We would have to claw back the hefty cost of them by cancelling that part of our travels that takes us into malaria risk areas, so our revised anti-malarial strategy is based on a worryingly low tech “don’t get bitten” approach. More positively, we scored some tranquilisers from the good doctor. The passengers and crew on our flight to South America will not have to witness the increasing agitation and, surely this time given the length of the journey, an inexorable slide into air rage that always seems to be just a broken in flight movie or carelessly reclined seat away feature of our long haul experiences.

We were thinking about taking the ferry to Green Island this afternoon, but I’ve seen the consequences of taking to the seas after a heavy night and will be remaining firmly on terra firma today. We weren’t actually going to do anything yesterday either, but one can only laze for so long before the need to do something asserts itself. We satisfied this urge to activity by taking a late afternoon stroll into town. In order to spice up what would otherwise have been a fairly dull wander around a tourist district that we have become all too familiar with by now we held a photographic contest. The idea was that C and I would each take pictures of whatever took our fancy, select our favourite then agree whose was the best. The winner would surely have been the one who managed to capture the bats in flight, but unfortunately the camera is not so good at action shots. There is a delay between releasing the shutter and the picture being taken and neither of us felt that a picture of empty sky was a worthy entry in our competition, our efforts rewarded instead with prolonged bouts of staring directly up like vacant idiots and neck ache. Predictably enough, when the pictures were selected and the votes cast, the result was a dead heat. The competing entries are published here. Now I don’t know if this is obvious from the pictures, but the competition was begun when we were already well into our cups. If you feel so inclined please do add a comment to vote for your favourite. The winner gets to have something nice at the expense of the loser, the exact cost, variable according to how I think my chances of winning are going, to be determined by me.

During a day significantly less influenced by alcohol we spent Saturday once more at the reef. This time we chose a budget operator running an apparently medium sized diesel engined catamaran to the outer reef. I say ‘apparently medium sized’ because once all the passengers had been packed aboard we actually had less room to move around than the sailing boat we boarded for our previous dive trip. Whilst underway we seemed to spend much of our time playing musical chairs with our fellow tourists. Many a face displayed the tension of a desperate need to visit the only working loo on board in conflict with an equally desperate need to keep hold of a hard won seat. We lost our seats fairly early on to an older English couple who played a crafty waiting game based on a strategy of hawk like vigilance and creeping acquisition.

Despite the somewhat cramped conditions aboard, the actual diving/snorkelling was great. Being the outer reef the incidence of dreaded jelly fish was much less than the previous trip, allowing me to snorkel pretty much freely where I pleased. The reef itself was, as far as I remember, the most dramatic, with shallow coral dropping away to a distant unseen sea bed creating great walls of reef. Maybe after three trips my marine confidence was growing, but I seemed to see a greater variety of sea life. There were large napoleon wrasse as big as a human torso, brightly coloured angel fish and, no naturalist I, bright luminescent blue fish and shoals of little silvery darting fish, to name or at least describe but a few. I spent a great deal of time and two underwater cameras worth of film snorkelling around whilst C went diving. I’m not publishing any of these pictures here for two reasons;

• Despite my best efforts they are pretty much the same as all our other dive photos, i.e. washed out and monochromatically blue;
  
• I figure that no-one would be all that interested in seeing photo after photo of my right index finger tip.
  

C once again took to the deep like a trained diver, though somewhat disconcertingly for her this time, her 5th and 6th dive in less than three weeks, was required to link arms with her fellow introductory divers. Whilst reportedly pleasant enough, her verdict on best dive experience comes down firmly in favour of the first trip. Her thinking may have been coloured by the reaction of the crew to her report that she had been stung by something during her pre-dive snorkel. Given that this is jelly fish season and that someone had only recently been hospitalised by a sting the somewhat disinterested response and desultory spray with fresh water had even C flummoxed, used as she is to the standard “take-two-aspirin-and-come-back-in-a-few-days-if-it-doesn’t-get-better” response to most medical consultations. We were both a little relieved as time passed and anaphylactic(?) shock did not set in but would have preferred a more positive and timelier affirmation that all was well.

Of all the vessels that had taken us out on our three reef trips we had not one photograph to assist the single bar electric heater in warming us in our old age. Fortunately our return journey took us screaming past the sailing boat of our second trip, and this sad omission has now been rectified. I’m glad we got something more evocative of the ocean and not some non descript all-function no-form marine equivalent of a coach.

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