Orpheus Island Field Trip for Coral Reef Geomorphogy

Here is a summery of our field trip at Orpheus Island.
We left campus at 3:30 am and got to Tylers beach for the sunrise. Then we had to wait for the last boat to get to the island so we watched a movie on Scott's labtop.







Next we got settled into our rooms and had morning tea. We got into our groups for our project and relaxed the rest of the day and ending with some intense games of spoons.









Our Project consisted of us taking data on transects of 6 different sections of beach, 4 at Pioneer B ay and 2 at Iris Point. The main objective was to compare an contrast the high energy reef (Iris Point) and the low energy reef (Pioneer Bay). This brittle star is part of our habitat descriptions.






We got to snorkel every day at some point. This was at Iris Point. We had to be covered head to toe because of Jelly Fish. This made it impossible to dive down and see anything because we would always float back up. Morgan had the hardest time because she would go a foot down and float right back up and even break the surface! It was really agitating, but the reefs were pretty shallow so it wasn't that much of a problem.



The sunsets were beautiful! Every day was amazing pretty much. This was the last day we were on the island and we had just got back from Iris Point. We had to eat dinner and work on our lab report that was due. Every group was up till odd hours of the morning finishing it. The range of ours people got sleep was scary!! We heard from 3.5 hours to 1.5 hours and then most people stayed up all night finishing it. I suppose this was because we had to be up at 5am to get ready to leave before the tide dropped.
Overall it was an awesome time!!

our lives

We have been doing a lot of homework since Brisbane. We finished a coral reef paper, a project proposal on the anthropogenic acoustics involving humpback whales off the coast of Hawaii, and are now doing a history paper. Yes it has been fun... We have been enjoying the puppy that belongs the the head of house at Rotary, his name is Roty. As you can see he is adorable!!! We don't have very much left for the rest of the semester. One lab report, two presentations, and a field trip. We have two weeks of finals and a whole week off to study!! Then off to Hawaii :D

Brisbane -> Surfing with Mojo

We had an awesome time touring around Brisbane on our first day. We saw a ton of historic landmarks and went up to the tower of the city hall. They were working on construction because they built it on a swamp and now it is sinking. We went on the wheel which was kind of like the eye in London. We spotted an awesome free pool that we checked out after. We went around 5 times when they only said 3! We had a sweet lunch in Anzac park on Anzac day! There was a huge memorial with guards and everything. We then met up with the Mojo bus and it took 5 ish hours to get to Spot X at Woolgoolga. We went surfing 3 times and each session was different. The fist day was sweet waves but the current was ridiculous. The second day there was no current, but the waves were small. We did pretty well. Scott got up pretty much every time. Morgan and Hilary got up most of the time but we had a blast anyway. We went to Byron Bay for 2 hours and looked around the shops and got amazing ice cream sundae's with our new friend from Holland. It was an awesome trip!