Last month I spent a week up at Lizard Island Research Station, helping a friend to establish some permanent transects to measure juvenile coral growth. My job was to drive the boat, hammer metal stakes into the (non-living) substrate, stretch a tape measure between them (so that Lucie could map out the locations of juvenile coral colonies) and try not to get too sunburnt on boat duty. I failed somewhat on the the latter.

As a ‘fish person’ I know embarrassingly little about coral, so it was interesting to get a different perspective on the reef, and see how the ‘coral people’ work.I learnt that coral people move very, very slowly. It would take Lucie almost an hour to finish a 10m transect (doing fish counts, I would cover 500m in an hour). This allowed me plenty of time to get to know that patch of reef intimately, and to have a nice conversation with a cuttlefish.

We had to delay the trip by a few days due to cyclone Olga, which pretty much ran straight over the island. Unfortunately this meant that the visibility underwater wasn’t great. On the surface though the weather got better and better. On our last morning we made the sweaty hike up to ‘Cook’s Look’ at the top of the island (359m) – the views were definitely worth the effort.

More photos here, here and here.