Today’s post will be a brief one as far as the chatter is concerned. Eunie has gone off to Fiji to represent the Papua New Guinea Chamber of Commerce and Industry at some big Pacific Island international conference. I find this intensely amusing as, I am quite certain, this is the first time in history which someone who’s primary work is being a missionary has ever been chosen to do this. This makes me proud of my wife, of course, but it is also satisfying that our constant guidance within our organisation that we should fully engage with all segments of society have paid off. The salt isn’t much good for anything as long as it’s in the shaker.

While moping around at the office last week moaning that I had to stay once again at home while Eunie went off to exotic places our receptionist, Elizabeth, said to me, with what seemed like a mocking tone, “Well, why don’t you just GO!” So, in my Mars way, I began to tick off all of the reasons why I couldn’t go. First on the list was:  I can’t afford it. The second was: The IT operations will fall apart.

Eunie put me “on the carpet” in her corner office – the one with windows – and gave me my instructions. “You can write enough magazine articles about your trip to more than cover your expenses.” That took care of reason number one. “You already have Mark coming in at least once a week to help out with the technical stuff. Just put him on notice that you’ll be gone.” Reason number two shot down like a rabid dog. Within an hour she had all the bookings done and had gotten me an Australian visa for my night in Cairns. Oh, how I love powerful women!

So, on Wednesday morning I’ll be off to Fiji. I’ll try to post daily while I’m travelling. I would have gone on Friday with Eunie, but, of course, Air Niugini was by then booked up for days with long waiting lists. For a country which depends on air travel exclusively for internal commerce, we have a pretty sorry example of a national airline. Anybody want to argue that point? And don’t use “they are doing the best that they can” as an argument.

Well, I said that I wasn’t going to chatter. So much for promises. The cat being away, the mouse played yesterday. I took a long, fairly fruitless ride up the North Coast Road with Ush to a place which we heard about from the Marshalls at a party at Lockland’s house on Saturday night. It was Marleen’s last party before departure and Ush’s birthday. I severely abused a bottle of Chardonnay and danced and kakaoked until 01:30 when Monty and Meri Armstrong finally herded me to their car and deposited me back at our house. Chattering again . . .

Anyway, 108 kliks up a road which is the Swiss cheese of highways you will find a place with a promising name: The Tapira Surf Club:

That’s the Harley sitting there in front of a little bar shack just to prove that we actually went up there.

It looks considerably better with Ush decorating it:

It was an exhausting ride up there. On three separate occasions I had both wheels locked up with Ush slammed up against my back to get the beast slowed down quickly enough to avoid Harley-eating potholes which stretched across the road.

I had decided already that I would have one beer only and smoke a nice Cohiba which Pascal Michon gave me on Saturday. It turned out to be a bit of a wasted trip. There was no surf, nobody home and only a toasty warm beer:Nevertheless, Ush and I had a nice time chatting in the club house or whatever they call it. We asked when the surf was up. The answer was “October”. Go figure.

I’ll finish up with a rather remarkable image which I shot on The Henry Leith on Saturday.

On the left side of a fan coral which you are seeing side-on is the rather rare Longnose Hawkfish (Oxycirrhites typus). On the right is a Black-Saddled Toby (Canthigaster valentini). They are both nibbling bits off of the fan coral. In the background is the extremely rare Rozas savagica bearing the common name of Roz Savage.

I feel quite smug about this shot.

I’ll get into the explanation of the confusing title of this post later. First, you have to get up with me at 05:30 to come out and see the sunrise. It wasn’t particularly thrilling this morning. I caught the first light here with three exposures of 15 seconds each stitched together in a panorama with Photoshop:The water was very calm this morning and the long exposures turned it into a mirror.

While I was at it, I made this new header for Madang – Ples Bilong Mi:

The goofy font is called “Thriller”;  I have no idea why. I suppose that they had to call it something.

Yesterday, I left a “Mystery Fish” image with you so that someone could identify it. The result of that experiment was underwhelming. Our own Lucy Proctor, a home-town girl, answered correctly with the common name and  the taxonomic name! Meet the Longnose Hawkfish (Oxycirrhites typus)  in all its mighty splendor:

So, why the long, redundant title? In this case, I’m being a little pedantic. The common names are simply minor variations. In many cases, however the same fish will have completely different names in different places. To test this I Googled:

• long-nosed hawkfish – 9,380 hits
• longnosed hawkfish – 6,450 hits
• longnose hawkfish – about 14,000 hits

The hyphen in the first entry doesn’t seem to make any difference, probably because Google ignores it, even if you surround the word with double quotes. In the second entry, longnosed, Google asked me if I meant longnose, so it must be doing something to see what the favoured term is – very cute. “Longnose” is the clear winner. Here’s what’s interesting:

• “Oxycirrhites typus” – 8,420 hits

The correct taxonomic name falls somewhere in the middle of the number of references. Okay, okay, it’s not  very interesting. I’m just filling space here.

This may sound silly to some, but I’ve been trying to get these shots for more than ten years. It’s a fairly rare fish. The only place where I know that it can be seen almost without fail is on the The Henry Leith  near Wongat Island.

The little devils are very shy. They like to keep something between you and them. That’s why they are so hard to capture. In the shot above, the best I’ve ever managed, there is still a bit of pesky  coral between me and the fish. Both of these first two shots were exposed with natural light, no flash.

If you can get one to come out in the open, you can’t get very close or it will tease you mercilessly by moving each time it sees your finger tightening on the shutter release. At least that’s how it seems. The whole operation involves a lot of contorted positions, grappling to find a hold without damaging anything, and holding of breath until tunnel vision sets in. Not to brag, but one really has to work to get shots such as these.

Just to be contrary, I turned on the flash for this shot. The colours here are what you will see in most images of this fish. It’s prettier, but it is not as accurate as the shot taken with available light and corrected for tint and colour temperature:It is a lovely little fish and well worth the effort to capture its beauty.

Here is an image demonstrating good luck – bad luck. In a one second interval I had a chance for a perfect image of a Coral Grouper (Cephalopholis miniata):

As you can see, I blew the chance. The now tail-less fish will not be decorating my desktop.

Finally, because I’m not finished bothering you, here’s another nutsy header that I made up this morning while Eunie was getting ready to go to the office:

Silliness and whimsy keep me feeling young.

It’s Saturday morning, so I’m off for a dive. I don’t have much time for composition, so I’ll just show you some pictures. (with apologies to those who have seen them a hundred times already)

I like the Hawkfishes. Unlike some other families, there’s not an ugly one in the bunch. (Click on a picture to see a bigger version.)

This is the Arc-Eye Hawkfish (Paracirrhites arcatus). The common name comes from the arc-shaped marking over the eyes.

Here’s a Freckled Hawkfish (Paracirrhites fosteri). They start out as youngsters with just a few freckles and get more and more as they age (hmmm . . . that seems to be the way my old body is turning out)

Ah yes, the rare (except on the Henry Leith) Longnose Hawkfish (Oxycirrhites typus). Anybody want to venture a guess where it got it’s name. I’d be tempted to call it the Jimmy Durante Hawkfish, but nobody under 60 would get the connection. Richard Jones took this picture with my camera.

Here’s the Pixy Hawkfish (Cirrhitichthys oxycephalus). The name just makes me giggle.  Imagine a pixy hawk – let alone a pixy hawk fish. What a mish-mash of words.

And, as so often happens when you think you know what you are looking at, along comes a fish you thought you knew, but it’s a completely different color. This is the Red Variation of the Pixy Hawkfish.

Okay, that’s enough for today. I hear thunder in the distance, so the dive may be off . . . nevermind.