The Great Barrier Reef - The Voyage Begins!

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One baby turtle alone and new.
Finds a friend, and then there are two.
Two baby turtles crawl down to the sea.
They find another, and then there are three
Anon

After a summer break I have joined a different boat, the S/V Argo, for a new adventure sailing from the sunny climes of Australia to the even hotter and sunnier climes of Thailand. We have a crew of 21 students and 6 staff aboard, all champing at the bit to get going and see the exotic, the strange and the beautiful.

First stop, the Great Barrier Reef, one of the wonders of the natural world. So what is a reef? Well, imagine you have a blank white page in front of you and a large pot of bright blue paint. Dip your middle finger into the paint and then make a fingerprint on the piece of paper. Now imagine that you had to fill the whole A4 page with fingerprints. How many would it take? 50, 100, more? What if you then had to paint a line of fingerprints on the ground between your home and the local shop? It might take a while and an awful lot of fingerprints. Now imagine that the distance you had to cover with fingerprints was 1,600 miles (that is 2.5 times the distance between Lands End and John o’Groats.) Picture each of those individual fingerprints is a tiny animal called a coral polyp. Every polyp is a small blob of jelly covered in tentacles that sits in a hard skeleton cup, like an egg in an egg cup. The result is a living structure large enough to be seen from space made up of tiny individual creatures, all of which support thousands and thousands of other animals and plants. The coral polyps grow excruciatingly slowly, at a rate of about 1-5cm a year, about the speed that your toe nails grow, but these seemingly unimpressive creatures form the backbone of a remarkable habitat.

From the air the reef looks like a mosaic of isolated turquoise patches in a deep blue sea that shimmers brilliantly in the clear Australian light. At one patch reef you might spot a tiny cleaner shrimp walking ever so delicately over the motionless cheek of a grumpy looking grouper: the fish waits patiently to be picked clean of scraps of food and parasites like a car at a car wash, and the shrimp enjoys a tasty fast food feast. Or turn a corner and the graceful sinuous movement of an olive green sea snake may meet your eye. The snakes, venomous enough to kill you are amazingly curious always ready to check out the unfamiliar intruder in their watery kingdom. Suddenly an enormous shadow cuts out the sparkling light filtering down from above. Your gaze shoots up to see the ballerina of the sea, the glorious manta ray, performing loops and dives overhead. With their 6m wingspans, they haunted the dreams of sailors in bygone times, who called them devil rays, Satan’s equivalent of your pet dog! But now they are recognised for the harmless yet spectacular acrobatic, cruising, ocean wanderers that they truly are.

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Comments

[pajama]

fascinating
your writing never ceases to amaze me! i wish you would let me read more of it. ~P