Heron Island

So this is a Aerial shot of one of the more famous Island on the Great Barrier Reef

Heron Island

You can see the rather small Island on the left of the Screen surrounded by a cluster of dots. Those dots are photos of the island that people have put on Panoramio a photo sharing site linked to Google earth.

Anyway why am I showing you all this little piece of heaven you might ask? Well I’ve been on Heron Island for a field trip. I went there on the 1^st of November and got back on the 14^th of November. It was two weeks of boating and diving.

Hmmmmm diving I think I remember what that is it’s that activity where you go underwater and (in my case) work hard. I say this because I was the boat driver for the trip which means that I spent hours sitting on the boat waiting for my divers to come up from their dive. I did get to dive once and test out my regulators that I haven’t used since going to PNG. The gear worked well and I got to see some awesome patches of reef. There was a resident grouper called gus that was about 2m long and about 400 kilos. Also lots of Lion and Parrot fish. I will put some photo’s up on Picassa soon.

I’d never been to Heron (http://www.cms.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=54940) and it was an excellent opportunity to see the place and experience another (I think the last I haven’t been to on the GBR) research station. The station was huge but on this particular visit it was down to about 30% capacity. There was a fire a few months ago and the place is still in the process of recovering from that ordeal. (http://www.cms.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=68420). A lot of research and lab equipment went in the fire as well as all of the Laboratory and aquarium facilities. One weird thing though is that the Resort on Heron operates on daylight savings time all year round while the Research station operates on Queensland time all year round which does lead to some miscommunications between the two groups on the Island. Hard to get mad in a place like that though.

The Reefs around heron look to be in very good condition though. The prevalence of disease was at about 1 in 1000 colonies having an instance of some disease. No real bleaching to speak of and the water temperature hasn’t risen as sharply as it has in some of the more northerly reefs. Apparently there has been some instances of bleaching in areas such as Orpheus Island which is much further north and in an inshore environment. (go to Bleach watch http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/corp_site/key_issues/climate_change/management_responses/bleach_watch2.html if you know of any bleaching occurring. If you want to see what the current conditions on the reef are at the moment you can go to and use the reeftemp tool developed by CSIRO - http://www.cmar.csiro.au/remotesensing/gbrmpa/ReefTemp_application.htm). Also the Coral cover is fairly high up to 90% in some places.

What did happen on heron though is that it got windy. for about 6 of the 12 days I was there, there was 20-30 knot winds with seas to 3m. Nasty conditions for a 6m fibreglass dingy. The time we did get out though were amazing. Blue water gentle breeze and a slight rocking from some gentle waves. Almost heaven.

Not bad work this if you can get it.

Cheers L