Yesterday, Thursday, I got up at six, had my tea, finished stowing away almost all of my gear and clothing, and headed out to the Cairns Airport. Barrier Aviation, the wing we flew out of, had a microwave and one of those machines that you get a handful of candy out of. And some metal chairs. And not much else. Kind of looked like an out-of-commission rec room. They called us out in small groups, weighed our luggage, and then weighed us! It took three planes to get twenty of us to Lizard Island, because the planes only held nine people, including the pilot. It was absolutely pouring rain in Cairns, so we sprinted out to our plane with our bedraggled pilot. He showed me how to work the door of the plane (I had the "exit row" seat, which basically meant I was sitting next to the door), got in, and off we went, up into the extremely wild, not-so-very-blue yonder. But we got up, and once we got over the cloud cover it was quite lovely. The clouds burned off as we got away from Cairns, and you could see the reefs from the air. I tried to take some photos, but we'll see how they came out. The internet is a bit spotty here, so I'm not sure when I'll get them up. Anyway, the flight was about an hour, and we landed in the Lizard Island Airport. Which is a pavilion with some wicker chairs. And that's it.
Lyle, one of the two administrators here at the Lizard Island Research Station, came out to pick us up in his 4X4 and drove us along the sandy track to the station. We're staying in two dorm-style houses, about a two-minute walk from the beach, and a one-minute walk from the main LIRS building. We unloaded the food and bags, made a quick lunch, and went to the beach.
This place is incredible. We didn't have to get on a boat to snorkel. We put on our stinger suits, fins, and masks, hopped in the water, and swam about fifty metres to the reef. And snorkeled for about two hours. I saw another sea turtle, which was pretty cool, and thousands of fish. I like the little Christmas tree worms, which sort of look like rainbow bottle-brushes sticking out of the coral. And the coral itself is amazing. One perk of being a scientist is that you're allowed to touch things. Which, I'm pretty sure, the people paying $2000+ a night at the Lizard Island Resort aren't allowed to do. Hahaha. Incidentally, the resort and LIRS are the only places that people are permitted to stay on the island, aside from a small, limited-access campground. Not sure how Tony got our program in here, as LIRS is a really serious, high-demand research station that only takes around 12 student groups a year, but I'm awfully glad he did.

Friday I got up at six, ate breakfast, and went to the little classroom for a five-minute talk about Watson's Bay, one of the sheltered reefs where we'll be collecting the data for our fish project. Then we had a short boat ride in the cheerful yellow LIRS boats and started snorkeling on the reef, which happens to be right in front of the resort. There are tons of huge, fancy boats in the water. There's one particular sailboat, a three-master called the Juniper, which is especially nice. Daddy would like it. But anyway, Watson's Bay is a very shallow reef, only about six metres at the water column. We were supposed to scope out potential study fish for our fish project.
We had a few minutes of down time after coming in, followed by lunch, followed by a lecture. Then we got back in the water and headed to part of the outer reef, on the exposed side of the island. This reef was quite deep, probably about ten metres, so you couldn't do much diving down and poking around in things. But there was a lot of coral cover there. I looked out to the ocean side of the reef while I was swimming, and was surprised by a school of enormous (<4m) bumphead parrotfish! There were around thirty of them, and they were really cool. I swam with them for awhile. They are sort of like aquatic cattle in their demeanor.