yay for procrastination!!  i reallyreallyreally don't wanna be working on my research paper right now, so i figured, hey why not update my blog so i feel somewhat productive while still not doing anything worthwhile!!  great idea right??  hahaha sooo anyways, this weekends been kinda slow.  friday i went over to maggie with an aussie friend who's into diving fishing hunting camping...basicallly he's an aussie version of me, only he can handle being around amphibians.  anyways, the plan was to dive and try grab some spiny lobsters (they call um crayfish) cuz theres apparently tons in the rocks on the edge of horseshoe bay.  of course, since this is me we're talking about, the plan didn't work out too well, since there was about 4 feet of visibility.  i was wearing florescent yellow fins, and i could barely see the tips of my fins thru the water.  soooo basically, you would dive to the bottom (which you couldn't ever see) and try to find a cave, and once you found one, you'd have to stick your head all the way inside to have any hope of seeing anything.  sooo after about 30-40 mins of this, we got tired of feeling like shark bait and went in.  keep in mind, this is the bay where we saw the 8ft tiger hooked on the shark trap last time i came to maggie, so the jaws theme song kept playing in my head the whole time we were diving.  after the dive, we hiked back to the middle of the bay and grabbed some onokine fish'n'chips, then had a fat kanak attack and passed out on the sand.  clearly, it was a productive day.  saturday we went to the townsville cultural festival, which was kinda cool too.  allkine different cultural food that was...decent i guess.  there was also a section where there was arts and crafts.  i started talking to a couple maori guys who were doing some maori woodcarvings and had some tattoo samples they did.  it was kinda weird, we were talking, and then he asked "so where you from?  hawaii?"  i kinda tripped out cuz we'd only been talking a minute or so and i wasnt even wearing a shirt that says hawaii on it.  there was also a bunch of performances from all the different cultures, the funniest was the samoan dance where one of the guys didn't have any idea what he was doing, and he was standing front and center, trying to figure out what to do by watchin everyone else.  of course he was about 2 seconds behind them, which was hilarious to watch.  k anyways...i kinda ran out of stuff to talk about and procrastinate with.  dang i wish writing my paper would be this easy.  k chutes time to attempt to be productive

horseshoebay zones.  we were diving along the rocks to the right of the pic

kanakattack zones.  hows that low tide

yes, they did have adobo.  no, they did not have balut or lumpia.

hooooo sole uce!!  shmall kine washed out by the light

as promised, here's the whitewater rafting pics!!  sorry for the kinda crappy shots but i was holding onto the string by my teeth, since we needed to paddle with both hands and i'm too lazy/cheap to go out and get a headband to mount it on.  i tried to find some of the better shots out of the 480 pics+vids i took, i'll try edit the footage and make it into a video and put it on youtube or something when i have more time. chutes

ho mean da wetsuits

pre-sesh stokage

da krew

other half of da krew

jamie...model status 24/7

calm before the rapids

some rocky rapids

shack-a-lackin!!  almost as good as getting barrelled...sorta

swimmin down river!

headed towards the freezing waterfall

jill looks so stoked!  mama becca...not so much

time fo tress!!

hoooo brah howz dis shack??

spittin barrels zones

swamped! good thing the boat got holes to drain um

soooooooo this weekend we were supposed to go on a field trip with our program up to mission beach to get up to shenanigams with some aboriginal bruddahs and sistahs, do some white water rafting, and have bonfire shenanigans under the stars.  the whole field trip was supposed to go the whole weekend.  but...it only lasted friday-saturday.  we got the white water rafting down, and some artsyfartsy photos under the stars (which were pretty amazing, since there were no lights at all to outshine the stars), but our bus broke down and so we had to cut our field trip short and head back to townsville a day early.  we were not stoked at all about this babylonion move but asz y hahd ah?  anyways, since we came back to town a day early, we figured we'd go to reef HQ, the local aquarium, since we hadn't gone during orientation.  it was pretty sick, especially the predator tank.  there was some fat uluas swimming around the tank, there were two that were close to the 70-80 pound mark i think.  the girth on those things was ridiculous, they looked way too fat for their length.  they also had a huge paopao swimming around that looked around 30lbs and a big pile of menpachi uluas around 7lbs.  they also had this huge napoleon wrasse and a gigantic nurseshark lookin shark.  the aquarium also had a turtle hospital that we got to check out, but im still not convinced that those things are endangered anymore.  anyways here's the pics from the aquarium, i'm still going through the 480 pics i took with my gopro when we were whitewater rafting.  i'll try to get my friends to send me some of the pics we took of the stars, it was seriously one of the most amazing star gazing experiences i've had and we got some super sick shots on their fancy long exposures.  soooo here's part 1 of this weekend's adventures, more to come when i get inspired to go thru the load of gopro pics and pick out the good ones/edit the videos

paopao+ulua zones

red emperor...this thing looked like some good steaming

shark jaws

coral reef half of the tunnel, if you look close theres a good sized moana kali in the middle of the pile

freshwater sawfish...in a saltwater tank?  hmmmmm

more ulua+paopao zones.  check the girth on that thing

hugangous nurse shark thing.  it was easily over 8 feet, probably 4-5 foot girth.  super fatty

some kinda grouper...coral grouper?  looked good eating haha

queensland grouper skeleton

giant clam

fluorescent corals!  apparently lots of corals do this, you just can't tell in shallow waters, you gotta dive deeper to see them do this...or put them under a blacklight

oldschool scuba zones

stonefish...can you spock umz?

philip, the sick turtle

meannnn kine beer+jill creepin

zomg look at this, over a week with no posts and now two posts in three days.  i am so on top of my stuff its not even funny.  HAH good joke.  anyways, i got back from the field trip up to cairns (aka sit on a but for the majority of my weekend).  its supposed to be a 4 hour bus ride or so, but on the way up, there was a huge accident with a 18-wheeler or something.  basically, we heard that the trailer flipped upside down, and another one fishtailed across the road and blocked everything, as well as spewing all of the stuff inside all over the road.  sooooo we had to sit and wait for the tow truck/clean up crew to clear the road off enough for us to pass by, which 3 hours of sitting and waiting.  luckily the bus had a dvd player, and the bus driver came well stocked so we watched some adam sandler movie, hangover 2, and something else on the SEVEN HOUR BUS RIDE up to cairns.  when we finally got there, we went straight to the grouper research facility and got taken for a tour thru the place.  it was kinda cool but a lot of it was more technical/less exciting than i thought it'd be.  the groupers were huge though, some of them were over 1.5 meters long and weighed in at about 80-100 kilos.  i think those were the queensland grouper, but im not too sure.  the coral trout were smaller but really nice lookin fish, kinda like a roi, but red and/or white instead of the brownish purple like roi (if that means anything to anyone).  the groupers were pretty ugly fish, but looked like a real big slab of sashimi swimming around in a tank haha.  after the tour we went to the hostel we were staying at, (which had a nightclub/bar right downstairs) and ate dinner (and drank with our professors).  i even discovered i get one bruddah man from haleiwa in my class who's in oz for his masters in aquaculture, which was kinda cool, but ended up making us wanna be back for some surf/epic grindz.  anyways he's got a house and promised to invite me over when they make chicken katsu which sounds pretty cherreh to me.  the next day we went to a barramundi farm, which looked a lot like the shrimp farms out in kahuku.  i've discovered barramundi is a freakin good eating fish, pretty clean meat, tastes good steamed.  kinda similar to the fish they steam with tofu in the chinese restaurants.  after that we headed back to townsville, making a quick stop off at this rest stop on the road, which happened to be across from a pretty sick little beach.  it looked kinda like kaneohe bay, with the islands and mountains right by the water.  anyways i think i've written enough for one blog post, cheers if you've actually read this far.  chutes!

flipped over trailer on the side of the road...sketch

some of the stuff that got strewn all over the road.  

cruisin flipped trailer zones.  i tried to get pics of the stuff as we were driving by haha

coral trout zones.  these things looked pretty cherry for poaching chinese style

one big boy.   hard to tell how big they are, but this guy was around 4-5 feet long, probably weighed in at around 140 lbs or so

same tank, different fish.  to give you some size scale, the windows were about 2'x2' and this guy's head was as long as the window

imagine sticking your head into a cave and having one of these guys staring back at you...shoot umz or bail??

looks like a lotta sashimi/fish head soup.  meaaaannnnn

"genuine kangaroo scrotum" anyone want one?

barramundi farm zones

aereators at the farm.  each pond is about an acre, roughly 2 meters deep.  big ponds

one of the empty ponds they were letting dry out so they could clean out all the sediment from the bottom

bebeh barramundi cages to protect them from the birds

settlement pond, used for catching the sediment before it goes back to the river

quick panorama zones

fish processing zones for barramundis.  no gut no clean, just ice um and ship

the ice machine.  the door was 7 feet high, and the pile of ice almost reached the ceiling in the middle

pretty sick little beachie

looks just like eastside