Elad’s blog

Lady Musgrave was the wife of Queensland’s first governor. She was famous for her tea-parties, which - along with her husband - are probably the reason she got an island named after her.
Yesterday I went on a one-day two-dives cruise to Lady Musgrave Island, which is located some 60 k”m off the town of 1770 (some town. It contains exactly 138 houses and one liquer store.). This island is a representative island of the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef, which will accompany me from now throughout the East Coast. The island itself is a small coral cay (it takes some 20 minuts to circle it by foot), which hosts a forest of Pisonia trees and is surrounded by a large coral lagoon.
About a hundred years ago some politician, in hwat is one of the stupiddest actions I ever heard of, brought goats to the island and set them loose so “survivors of shipwrecks that arrive to the island will have something to eat”. The goats, of course, totally demolished the island, and it took the australians almost 70 years to get rid of them and let the island rebuild itself.
The island rebuilt a forest of Pisonias. The Pisonia is a large tree, somewhat similar to our Berry trees, which attracts plenty of sea birds to nest in. Actually, when the birds (specifically a bird called Noddy) build their nests, from leaves and bird-droppings, the leaves start to cover with a gluey material. Some birds (but not all) get glued, can’t go out, die in the tree, and then fall to the ground and fertilize it. A very smart tree!

The corals at Lady Musgrave are huge, but have much less colors then in Eilat. On my first dive we found a bunch of sea-turtles lying on a coral-bed (there must have been at least 10 giant turtles in this colony), and it was nice swimming with them. We also found one reef shark - a small white-tip shark, this time. It just kept escorting us for 10 minuts, it was really nice (don’t worry - it’s a harmless reef type, NOT the Giant White maneating Shark).
On the second dive my guide did the nastiest trick. We began our dive strait into a herd (is this the term? a large group of fish) of large Cod fish - they where around 45cm-50cm each. My guide gave them a few sardins he was hiding in his wetsuite, and after eating them they just escorted us the entire dive! We didn’t see big marine mammals or other exstraordinary things on that dive, but swimming inside all these cods for some 42 minuts was really nice.
The sailing to the island itself was also nice - we were escorted in part of the way by dolphins, and close to the island we saw several herds (I feel it’s wrong. What’s the correct word?) of flying-fish. Moreover, some marine birds where trying to feed on the flying fish, by catching them as they where flying. Right out of a Stevenson’s book.

Today we have this slightest problem - the australians celebrate the queen’s birthday (yes. The English queen. The one who sent them here.) so almost everything is closed. We’ll see what we can do.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 13th, 2005 at 6:42 and is filed under Travels, Australia East Coast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.