On the 26 May, we witnessed a clear sky and a lunar eclipse. For a few days before this event, we’d had cool blustery winds from the south and southwest. But the day following it became calm and settled, so much so even my weather app decided winds of less than 1 km an hour should be expressed as ‘calm’!
The weather on 27 May 2021
The following day, the weather quickly turned again, and the remainder of this week has seen enormous surf, squally winds and poor visibility in the water. In fact, just about zero viz!
Today is the first day of winter, with cool winds blowing straight up from Antarctica. Many readers will laugh, but for a sub-tropical island, we are really feeling the wind chill at the moment. In a conversation I had with a fellow swimmer this morning, we agreed that if you just keep swimming, you don’t even notice it getting cooler. It really is a case of mind over matter. When it gets a little cold in the water, or rather when I get out, I always remind myself that there are reef fish in there, and they don’t like cold water! Like the beautiful Three-striped butterflyfish, Chaetodon tricinctus, drawn by @narwee_sketch for us this week.
Despite the conditions, I only missed swimming on one day, and I still managed to see a few beautiful things during the week. I always love to capture a photo of the green moon wrasse, Thalassoma lutescens. This one is giving me a quizzical sideways glance! And I was lucky enough to witness an initial phase surge wrasse, Thalassoma purpureum, eating a crab lunch.
Another exciting observation this week was the turtle. It always feels such a privilege to come around a corner and face to face with one of these amazing creatures.
Professor Andrew Baird, a researcher from James Cook University contacted me this week about my images of corals on this website (check them out here). So he could have a better look, I uploaded around 350 of them to a Dropbox folder. He has kindly gone through them, giving me IDs on many, and asking for some further images on a few he thinks maybe rare or endemic to Norfolk Island.
This is incredibly exciting. Andrew and a colleague plan to visit in August to have a look for themselves.
And, saving the most exciting news til last, and a little delayed as I have been waiting on confirming an ID: on 10 May I photographed a tun shell in the bay and uploaded the images to iNaturalist. Many regular swimmers will see these from time to time in the deeper areas of our bays, although sightings are definitely becoming rarer. Tuns are a large species of sea snail, or mollusc. This particular tun was quickly identified as being Tonna melanastoma. This truly is an amazing observation. There have been very few specimens identified over the last century, often trawled up from depths of 300 m. Apparently, this is the only photograph of a live mollusc in the public domain.
Since then, I have co-authored a paper with Chris Vos, a Belgian conchologist with some 45 years’ experience in the field. It is going to be published in August in a journal in Europe. I’ll definitely keep you posted on this one!
