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