I already went into the whole thing of Leper Island  never having had any lepers on it. If you want to read the quasi-amusing details, you can find them here. On Saturday, we first dived Planet Rock  (more about that tomorrow) and then the southern tip of Leper Island.  I had only about 70 BAR of air left in my tank, but that was enough for forty minutes of bimbling around on top of the reef snapping anything that moves and some that don’t.

For instance, here’s the familiar (to regular readers) female Latticed Sandperch (Parapercis clathrata):

The female looks just like the male, minus the big black bulls-eye behind the eyes.

I’m just nusto about spirals. They are everywhere in nature. This coral (Acropora clathrata)  often makes pretty spiral shaped shelves with frilly coloured edges:I’d like to have a coffee table with one of these cast in acrylic plastic. No, cancel that. I’d have to kill about a million coral polyps.

There were some beautiful sand waves on top of the reef. The water above was quite bumpy. There was a lot of chop and some slow rollers coming over the top. This makes the sand pile up in lovely symmetrical waves. It also makes photography difficult, as sand is flying everywhere and you are being dragged around like a two year old child kicking and screaming through the supermarket because mom won’t let you have that 90% sugar breakfast cereal that makes you think that you’re Superman:Never mind. If you eat enough of that stuff you’ll soon be on crack cocaine.

Despite the thorough trashing, I was able to get a couple of nice three frame reef panoramas. The Canon G11 makes this a snap. There is even a stitching feature in the software that comes with the camera so that you can do the job without Photoshop:Much as I hate to brag, I have to mention that one of my previous reef panoramas will soon be on display at the Monterrey Bay Aquarium as a 7 by 2 metre background for one of their displays.

I didn’t think that it was that good. However, after I spent a few hours working on it, making it about 24,000 pixels wide and working the colours over until it made me go mmmmm, I sent it off to them and they liked it. Here’s another one:Now, if I could just get someone to actually pay me  to do this stuff . . .

These last two shots make me feel like the King of the Sea. This is a rarely seen juvenile Oriental Sweetlips (Plectorhinchus orientalis):During over 2,000 dives, I’ve only seen one maybe three or four times. They are very cautious. Being only about as long as your pinkie and as conspicuous as a fire engine red 1959 Cadillac, they are understandably secretive.

They usually try to hide under ledges. They never stay still. They swim ceaselessly in a tarty, twirly, Chubby Checkers kind of “Come on Baby, Let’s Do the Twist” dance which doesn’t at all help them to avoid predators. I don’t see where they get the energy, let alone how they  stay alive:I have to mention that I would never have gotten these shots to look as good if they had come from the Canon G10 instead of my new G11. The increase in the dynamic range allowed be to capture both the deep, deep brown and the dazzling whites without losing all detail.

I’m the proverbial happy camper. Except my camp is underwater.

A few days ago in front of our house the sky was sombre and troubled. The lighting was terrible, but I gave it a go anyway. It took nine frames from left to right stitched together in Photoshop to make this rather strange panorama:It does capture the sweep of the sky nicely, but it gives a completely distorted idea of what is in front of our house. If you can imagine looking back over your left shoulder as you stand facing the opposite side of the harbour (in the middle of the image) you would see the coconut trees on the left side of the image. Then, as you turn your head slowly to the right you will have to look hard over your right shoulder to see the coconut trees on the right. The image covers about 200°.

How hard can it be to take a picture of a cloud? Well, as it turns out, it’s not so easy, if you want to capture all of the airy nuances:This nice towering cumulus cloud (Cumulus congestus) was shooting up like a rocket when I snapped it. The trick is to expose for the brightest spot on the cloud. If you set your camera’s metering system (built-in light meter) to ‘spot metering’ you can put the brightest place in the cloud in the center of the frame and your camera will set that as ‘white’. Then you will either need to press the shutter button part-way down to lock in the exposure or use an “Automatic Exposure Lock” button, if your camrea has one. I also used a polarising filter in front of the lens to darken the sky. I think that the polariser also helps to bring out some of the shady details in the cloud.

Here is a shot of the beautiful reef colours at the South end of Leper Island:I guess that I’m lucky, because green is my favourite colour. There are about a million shades of green here. Green is everywhere!

We’ve been keeping a close eye on Kar Kar Island  since it was mistakenly reported that it erupted violently. It looks pretty peaceful in this shot:Earlier this year we did see steam and brownish smoke coming from two vents which appeared to be on the side of the crater.

So much for above. How about below?

While diving The Green Dragon  B-25 bomber a few days ago, there was a small school of Humpnose Bigeye Bream (Monotaxis grandoculis)  swimming around under the port wing. I usually don’t pay much attention to them as they are rather a plain fish. Suddenly I noticed this individual who, apparently, had recently barely escaped with his life from a predator:

That’s a fairly nasty wound. It appears to have happened recently, but already it seems to be healing inwards from the edges. This reminds me of the wound that our dog, Sheba, had on her foreleg.

Sometimes I come across something that is so unusual that it leaves me scratching my head. This is called an encrusting sponge. There are many kinds; this one is a species of Haliclona:There are, strangely enough, very few invertebrates in the ocean which are truly blue. Aside from the beautiful blue starfish, this is the brightest blue invertebrate that I can think of.

Finally, here is another head-scratcher. When I looked at this image I was stopped for a moment figuring out what I was looking at:Glancing at the frames on either side of it, I suddenly realised that it is the tail of the Banded Sea Krait (Laticauda colubrina)  which I showed to you a couple of days ago. Given that this snake is at least 1.5 metres long, this gives you an idea of how deeply they go hunting in the crevices of the reef. You can clearly see the flattened paddle-like tail from which the genus takes its name.

Today we’re looking at coral pictures (mostly). But first I want to tell you about the most beautiful screen saver on the planet. Understand, that’s just one man’s opinion. It developed as an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.  You can find it here. You have to sign up for an account, but there’s no money involved. It does require an Internet connection occasionally to give the full effect of evolvement, but it works fine without one. Here’s a screen shot of the home page. If you like to fool around with screen savers, give this one a shot.Now, on to the coral and whatever.

Wouldn’t you know that the first one up is a species that I can’t find. I tried Googling “cup coral” which is the obvious name for this, but I couldn’t find anything like it. My invertebrates book is of no help. If you know the genus and species of this thing, please leave a comment:It is about six or seven centimetres in diameter.

I am pretty sure about the identification of this coral (Acropora cerealis): It is one of the most common species here. It is very delicate. A brush of a fin can knock off a huge chunk.

This one is quite beautiful when the sun is shining down through the water. It is a species of the Montipora  genus:It has many tubeworms embedded in it. None of them came out to play.

This is another very pretty coral (Pachyseris speciosa).  Both this and the one above are massive. They are often over two metres across:Sometimes what is growing on, in or near the coral is just as interesting. Here Sea Squirts (Atriolum robustum)  grow surrounded by Porites  coral:Well, they obviously don’t grow on the coral, but on a bit of dead coral that is embedded in the Porites. 

I’m a bit of a fan of Sea Squirts. This one you’ve seen several times before. You can enter ‘molle’ in the search box to see previous posts. This one is Didemnum molle.  It has a nice coral, which I think is Goniastrea australensis  in the background:

The shading on the molle  is hard to get right.

Here’s another molle  with several species of coral in the background:

The molle  is about five centimetres across. You can also see a couple of Dascyllus reticulatus  in the background.

Did I mention that I’ve never been bored on a dive?

There are, so far as I know, no secrets of Leper Island.  I’m just reaching for a title. There’s little mystery concerning it, other than the fact that there were no lepers on Leper Island  (they were actually on nearby Pig Island  or Tab Island  as it is more properly called) . Yes, the lepers were on Pig Island  and Leper Island  was the place where they raised pigs to feed the lepers. Confused? Join the club. I got that information from Tamlong Tab, a man who should know.

What has all that got to do with today’s malarkey? Absolutely nothing. I’m just filling space here. Anyway, here are the lovely Finisterre Mountains  in the background with Leper Island  on the right and Little Pig Island  (which also has another name, but I can’t remember it now) on the left:

The big strip of land in the mid distance is Kranket Island.

We had an excellent dive in a spot on the North end of Leper Island  on Saturday. I hadn’t dived this spot for some time, so I had forgotten how rich it is in coral species. Here is a Porites  coral with a couple of very nice Christmas Tree Worms (Spirobranchus giganteus):

That’s probably my best Christmas Tree Worm shot yet. I’m very happy with it. To give you an idea of the scale, the two worms together would be about as wide as the width of your eye.

This flaccid looking spiky thing is a Divaricate Tree Coral, (a species of Dendronephthya (Roxasia)):

These things are fantastic at night. I think that the structure must be similar to optical fibre. If you shine a strong light into the base, the whole thing lights up like some kind of crazy lava lamp.

I’ll throw this bone to the coral freaks out there and hope that I’ve identified correctly. I’m not positive about the Acropora cerealis  in the foreground, but I am pretty certain about the Seriatopora hystrix  in the background:

I need to find myself a better invertebrates resource. My book is pretty thin.

This is the Common Lionfish (Pterois volitans):

They are usually fairly imperturbable. It won’t move much unless you poke your camera (not  your hand) right in its face and waggle it around. You’d be imperturbable too, if you had thirteen very poisonous spines sticking out of your back. This one, however, got into some kind a weird panic that I haven’t seen before. It started running away from me. When it swims fast, the delicate feather-like fins wave like pennants in a most beautiful display of the flight response. In the shot above, it is just about to swim under a ledge of coral.

In the morning we had all been complaining how hot it was. While we were down on the dive, I noticed that the light was getting dimmer. When we approached the surface we could see that rain was pouring down:

If you click to enlarge, you’ll see some tiny little splash rings where individual drops are hitting the surface of the water.

When we got back on the boat, the temperature had dropped about ten degrees C. Now we were all complaining about being cold.

Spome people are never satisfied.

I’ve always been disappointed with the satellite images on Google Earth for the area around Madang. Until today. I don’t remember how I drifted to Google Earth again. Something on another web site caught my eye, I suppose. Anyway, I downloaded the latest version and cranked it up to see if Madang looked any better.

WOW! You can see streets and everything. If you try to zoom in to the level of seeing who is parked where, it gets a little fuzzy, but you can see the colours of the cars just fine. No registration reading yet. Can’t see people very well. But Madang is finally coming in crisp and clear:Of course, the first thing anybody does with Google Earth is look for his house. Ours was easy to find. Just south of the end of the airport runway, north of the big pile of wood chips and directly across the harbour from the main wharf:
Here is a shot of Nagada Harbour and the Jais Aben Resort:
The top island is Leper Island and lower is the north tip of Kranket Island. In between is Magic Passage, one of our favourite diving locations. The reefs are very nicely visible:
Those familiar with Madang will recognise this location immediately. It is the north end of the golf course (at the bottom) and the Coastwatcher Monument at the upper left sticking up like a big white rocket ship. It looks to me as if this shot was taken at about 8:30 or 9:00 in the morning:
Here is a nice shot of Kar Kar Island. It’s too bad that the fringing reefs are not visible. Also the cloud cover hides the giant crater where the active volcano sleeps (for the moment):
The shots of Madang were taken before last July. I can tell because the huge mango tree that was behind our office is still visible. We chopped it to make room for an office extension.

It’s cool to join the rest of the world. Now, we too can send someone a link to say, “Here is where I live!”

Not a very imaginative title, but hey.

Let’s talk about Little Pig Island.

Yes, there probably are pigs on Little Pig Island,  as most assuredly are there people, whereas Pig Island  has neither pigs nor people (go figure). We’ve been over most of that before.

Little Pig Island  is situated snugly between Pig Island  and Leper Island.  Pig Island  is to the Northeast and Leper Island  is to the Southwest. A really fit footie could probably lob a pigskin to either without breaking a sweat.

No, there are, to my knowledge, no lepers on Leper Island,  though there used to be when it was a leper colony a long time ago. There may, in fact, be lepers abiding there, but the island is no longer named after them. It’s just a leftover; not the island’s real name anyway.

(By the way, people with Hansen’s Disease prefer not to be called lepers. I certainly do not blame them. I apologize for using the term in this post. I think that they prefer the term “Hansen’s Disease Affected” – a bit awkward, but carrying less historical baggage. So, if I am offending someone, I am sorry, but please note that this post is categorized HUMOR. Humorists are supposedly allowed to spout politically incorrect speech, so long as they are smiling when they do so. I am smiling now.)

Only a few people have recently moved onto Leper Island.  It probably has pigs, unlike Pig Island,  which, to my knowledge, has neither pigs nor people, as I said before.

So, Pig Island  and Leper Island  – on either side of Little Pig Island  – are both uninhabited, or nearly so in the case of Leper Island,  being only recently occupied by a few land-poor souls.

Pig Island  and Leper Island  are both pretty big while Little Pig Island  is teensy-weensy – a mere speck of ancient, rotted coral. It’s so tiny that you’d hardly notice it at all.

Here’s a chart to help you figure it all out. You’ll probably need to click it to enlarge:

You can see that Leper Island  (Paeowai Island  on the chart) and Pig Island  (Tab Island  on the chart) are both quite large compared to Little Pig Island  (Massas Island  on the chart).

I should mention that the Admiralty Chart  names are for stuffy, constipated people who like to be called “Skipper” or “Ensign Bowles-Sykes” or some such rubbish. Such people are quickly run out of Madang on a rail. We use the local names.

Got all that? Go back over it, please, until you’re clear. There will be an examination later.

Now, the question is:  What, in the name of sweet reason, are all these people doing on Little Pig Island ?  Have a look:

It’s chock-a-block. It’s wall-to-wall. It’s teeming. You can’t spit without hitting your neighbour. There’s not enough room to swing a dead cat. Et cetera.

Remember, these people are not reality-TV clowns pretending to be in the pernicious pit of poo. There is no TV production catering company to serve them California Cuisine when they’re feeling peckish. There are no air-conditioned Airstream caravans in which to lounge about while smoking, snorting, injecting, or utilizining other orifices to take into their spirit depleted bodies various exotic dopes. There is no ground for gardens. There is no potable water. There is no electricity. There’s no satellite TV, for pity’s sake. How do  they survive?

All romantic hogwash about the idyllic existence on a luscious tropical island would be forgotten like a bad movie as soon as your tummy started to rumble like a 747 and your throat felt as if a large, lethargic lizard had crawled down it.

We pass close to Little Pig Island almost every Saturday.

We just shake our heads in wonder.