Australia 2019 – Day 22 – Coral Sea Dreaming at sea

The crew is formed by Alba, a young Spanish woman, and Cameron, a young American. The captain is Jan, who is German by birth but has been in Cairns for more than 20 years. He has completely gone native and talks like an Australian (which means I don’t understand half of what he is saying). Jan assures me that crocodile meat tastes like chicken mixed with fish, and I will take his word for it.

The twelve guests include yours truly, a young American couple, a middle age Canadian couple (he is a Petroleum Geologist!), a German family with their 21-year old daughter, and an Islandic family with a teenager daughter and son. We have become good friends, and as I was chatting with the young American couple from San Diego, I told them that I lived in the Central Valley, near the town of Modesto. Without a second hesitation, Karen chimed in “I got my English degree form CSU Stanislaus in 2013”. Wow, what a small world!

The fire of the scuba divers has quenched considerably, so the number of snorkelers went up considerably. We had two swims and they were absolutely perfect. To the richness of fishes, abundant like the sands of Arabia, I added two sightings of marine turtles (one close enough that I could have touched it), and one sighting of a barracuda. Also, interspersed with a great variety of coral types, from time to time you find these “heads” with bright green long hair that swirls with the current. They are clumps of seagrass. Oh, and I also saw these ginormous clams, of the type Venus came out of, sitting semi-open in the floor of the reef, sucking vast volumes of water through one orifice, filtering the plankton suspended in the water, and ejecting the fluid with great force through a different orifice.

At noon we packed up our toys and undertook the four-hour traverse back to Cairns. On the way I asked Jan what he knew about the blanching of coral in the Great Barrier Reef. Yes, every time warm water sits on the reef the oxygen level of the water goes down, the fishes leave, and many of the coral species die. Two years ago this happened in a stretch of the reef north of Cairns. Then came a series of strong Willy-Willies that mixed cold oxygenated water with the warm water, oxygen level went up, the larvae of corals repopulated the blanched areas of the reef, and the fishes came back. Blanching of the reef happens now and then, but so far the reef has recovered just fine after those episodes.