8 posts tagged “sealife”

sometimes the most mundane aspects of a travel experience make the biggest impression, so i'd like to dedicate today's entry to food, preceded by a brief weather report.  neptune has continued to smile upon us, with very gentle swells accompanied by light zephyrs, or sometimes more refreshingly stiff gusts, as we move further into the tropics.  it is now decidedly muggy and the air conditioning is on in most parts of the ship, although in our cabin we prefer to leave the porthole open instead.  conditions have been fairly good (in theory) for whale-spotting, although the whales are not playing along.  instead we've had flocks of flying fish and visits from several birds, including - of all bizarre candidates - an owl.  before today i would almost certainly have scorned the idea of a sea owl, but short of a mass hallucination and some very weird camera tricks, i can't explain it away. this should-be nocturnal land-dweller  flew with us for several hours this morning, in fact, and may return tomorrow, if it decided to roost somewhere on the ship.
and it was far and away today's most exciting wildlife event.  apart from the whale-spotting efforts, the days until we reach our first biological sampling stations are mostly revolving around meals.  we are fed four times a day, every four hours starting from 7.30, and all other scheduled activities (plus naps, owl-spotting, and cards) are meticulously slotted in between.
my biggest reservation about joining this cruise, after the inconvenience of its timing and the nearly six-week absence from home and the pebbles, was actually the food.  i freely admit that i am a picky eater, and i'm pretty sure the relief i felt when i started cooking for myself was surpassed only by my mother's relief at the same development.  my usual list of don't-eat foods includes (but is not limited to) onions, seafood (including fish), green peppers, ketchup, and mayonnaise, plus a few more things usually too obscure to bother including (but hey, what the heck: veal, duck, any kind of organ meat or amorphous meat product including most sausages, and beer if that counts as a food).  the list of foods that don't appear on my home menu but may be eaten as politeness requires is much longer; a small sampling would include pretty much any bread other than white bread (especially 'chunky' bread with any kind of seeds, or sweet bread products like cinnamon bagels), peas, red and yellow peppers, things with nuts or raisins in them (although i like both on their own), anything with banana or banana-flavoring other than actual bananas, and most savory-sweet combo dishes.  you can see that the probability of finding an entirely tintenfisch-approved meal anywhere outside my own home is near zero.
luckily i married a saint who is both an excellent and accommodating cook, and whose own don't-eat list is short and very compatible, consisting of seafood and the easily omittable parsley and pineapple.
unluckily, my saint was not coming along on this voyage, and i would be at the mercy of an entirely unknown russian kitchen crew for over a month, who would be cooking on a scale capable of sustaining sixty people four times a day (enough to give the strongest of constitutions pause, i suspect) .  i packed a few chocolate bars, and a bag of cookies, resigned myself to probably suspending a few of the don't-eats (fish, for example), and envisioned either making illicit friends with some kitchen staff (a working knowledge of russian would have helped here), and/or returning home in a nearly translucent state.
to no one's astonishment more than my own, i have eaten almost everything put in front of me; i blame the constant motion of the ship (it takes a lot of effort to stand 'still'), and the invigorating salt air.  the top-ranking meals so far would have to be the daily soups, a delicious creamy rice pudding, and a couple of pasta dishes.  the 'surprisingly palatable' list contains borscht; a bizarre salad of peas and chopped pickles, beets, cucumber and carrots; and several kinds of fish.  the 'consumption ban temporarily lifted by necessity' litany (so far) reads: fish, shrimp, duck, and some kind of salami that was probably mostly made of blood.  and until today i wouldn't have been able to list anything i actually avoided/refused. but the honeymoon period couldn't last, of course, and when we sat down to 'tea' (the 3.30 meal) and were faced with bowls of cold chopped chicken buried under a 2-inch layer of cold chicken-broth flavored gelatine, i drew the line.  i did flop the gelatine layer aside and at least try the chicken, but i really couldn't get over the resemblance to jelly-meat-style cat food and had to give up pretty quickly.
it was then that the unlikeliest event of the day, and perhaps of my lifetime, transpired.  the other four biologists in my team watched my chicken jell-o investigations closely (which i would like to say stopped short of turning the bowl upside down just to see if it would hold... but i can't; it did).  when i put my fork down, perhaps a little visibly green around the gills, they pushed away their untouched bowls as one and shook their heads.  and one of them said, in complete seriousness, 'we know by now that if you won't eat it, we shouldn't even try.'
well.  anyone who knows me will realize how utterly ridiculous that statement is.  i chuckled to myself for the whole rest of today.  and i am considering calling for a helicopter to take me to shore right now, because i can just tell - no matter how the sampling goes, and what cool squid we find, i'm pretty sure that at the end of the cruise i will look back at that statement as my single proudest moment.

we just got back from a stunning weekend in dunedin, but before i launch into those pics, i should probably finish up with the poor knights. our little camera obviously isn't going to be used in any high-tech underwater filming any time soon, but it does convey some of the marine magic a little better than the still shots do.

and now, the more spineful contingent.

and now, back to your regularly scheduled undersea program. because there are heaps of photos, i thought i'd divide them up along biological lines, and start with the cool spineless stuff we saw.

over the weekend, we went back to the poor knights islands for some stellar diving.  i was last there about ten months ago (pics here and here) and was eager to return with the pebbles, hoping to take him through the amazing northern arch.  as it turned out, conditions were wrong for that site but pretty much perfect for the two sites we did dive.  the water was about 21 degrees C (i almost never finish a dive feeling anything but freezing; didn't even notice the temp on these two), the visibility about 20 meters. 

our first dive was in the channel between the two largest islands, and we started on a wall that was essentially vertical down to the sandy bottom (around 20 meters).  here i saw my first Tambja nudibranchs.

from the wall, we followed a horseshoe-shaped reef around to 'boom-boom cave,' which was an incredible experience.  we had been warned about it in advance, luckily - a blow-hole-type cave but with no outlet for the air/surf, so that when the waves came pounding in, the trapped air under the ceiling (and within our bodies) was rapidly and forcefully compressed, with an accompanying boom.  we felt the pressure change (about every ten seconds) through every bone in our bodies, reverberating inside our skulls and ribcages and making the small airspaces inside our ears vibrate (which eventually drove us out).  the cave floor was about 10m deep, the walls maybe 7m apart and the depth of the cave was about 20m in total.  it got dark fairly quickly but we made it about halfway in, and discovered some large blue moki, before our ears entreated us to return to a less violent spot.

our second dive was in a site we'd done on our very first trip to the poor knights, blue maomao arch.  we anchored across labrid channel from the arch and snorkelled over to drop down at the arch mouth.  entrance to the arch is gained (optionally) by swimming under a massive slanted boulder; you emerge into the deep sapphire twilight of a passage about 20m wide and 15m deep, with a few shafts of sunlight piercing the arch walls.

the walls of the arch are spattered with rainbow-colored epifauna.

and the feature for which the arch was named is a resident school of perhaps 50,000 blue maomao, who hang along the inland wall about halfway through.

over the next few days i'll post more pics!

on saturday we dived the mokohinau islands.  it was a gorgeous day in spite of the choppy ride out and chilly 16 degree water, and we saw many good things!

i had some trouble uploading about half of the dive pics the first time, so here are the rest.