Islamorada & The Blazing Mako Fishing Tournament

Our team, braving the ridiculous heat.

Last weekend the Oceanic Ecology team headed south to Islamorada in the Florida Keys to represent the DEEPEND project at the Blazing Mako Fishing Tournament. We took along a bunch of cool activities for people to do (all made up by our intrepid MSc students), as well as a tons of postcards and stickers featuring some of Dante's deep-sea fish photographs and (of course!), the temporary tattoos I designed:

It totes glows in the dark!

When we weren't working on the stand, I had a bit of time off to take some photos. It was stupidly hot during the day, so we didn't exactly go very far! Luckily, we had plenty of iguanas-in-trees to keep me entertained (and slightly pooped on) during the middle of the day while we were hiding out in the shade!

An iguana in a tree.

The evenings were a lot more pleasant, and I headed back to the tournament after work to see them lighting the bonfire (the 'Blazing Mako' itself!)

The blazing mako!

It also gave me a chance to try out my new Manfrotto BeFree tripod. I've never really done much low-light photography and there's not a lot of need for a tripod when you're on a boat, so it was fun to have a play around with it on the beach. If I can catch one of the lightning storms off the coast this summer with it I'll be a happy photographer!

A hut on the pier 

A family fishing under the full moon

Oh - Islamorada also has a sweet diving museum if you're interested in that kind of thing. It's pretty small, but they've got some really cool stuff covering the full history of diving!

Some of the one-person diving suits and commercial diving helmets on display in the diving museum.

North Queensferry / Carlingnose Reserve

The Forth Rail (and road) bridge at North Queensferry, as seen from Carlingnose Reserve.

North Queensferry is probably best known for their stunning views of the Forth Rail Bridge, and possibly for the Deep Sea World aquarium (if you haven't been, it's VERY cool!) However, the Scottish Wildlife Trust also run a lovely little reserve at Carlingnose Point with views looking west over the Firth of Forth.  ... If you can find it that is!

North Queensferry (link to map)

We parked at a car park underneath the rail bridge, found a sign showing that we were not only in the right place, but a mere stone's throw away from the reserve. It then took us about an hour of wandering the town and scrambling unnecessarily over the boulder shore before we admitted defeat, went back to town and managed to find the path leading to it.

There was a lot of really interesting dried out pieces of driftwood along the shore.

Top tip: if you ever arrive looking for the reserve yourself, there are no signs in the town, but you'll find it if you follow the signs for the Fife Coastal Path and head away from the town (or away from the grey road bridge if that's easier).

Look for the Fife Coastal Path and follow it west. There are no signs for the Carlingnose Point Reserve in town that I could find. 

The reserve itself is in place to protect locally rare populations of wildflowers and plants, and the dense scrub provides a nice habitat for smaller birds as well but it's also a nice viewpoint to look for seabirds on the shore. We visited in May and only saw a couple of eider ducks, but it was a really sunny day and it's possible that the birds had all finished foraging early in the morning and headed away to roost by the time we arrived.

The reserve was small and pretty quiet on the day we visited, but the vast fields of gorse were stunning!

There's an old ruined pier just offshore that had a sleeping gull on it, but the wildlife was keeping fairly quiet on the day we visited.

An old ruined pier lies just offshore off the reserve.

Sunny afternoons are perfect for napping, no matter what species you are!

The reserve itself is pretty small, but if you follow the Fife Coastal Path, you'll be led down to a big sandy bay where you get some lovely views over the Firth of Forth.

Following the coastal path brings you to this beach which was covered in oyster shells.

A group of cormorants were out enjoying the sun on the edge of the shore too.

The beach was also covered in oyster shells, which is pretty unusual and the first time I can remember seeing any - especially in such large numbers!

Shells from what I think might be native oysters (Ostrea edulis). I included a 10 pence coin for scale, which has a diameter of roughly 25 mm.  

I suspect they're possibly native oysters (Ostrea edulis), but I'm not an expert on these animals. If anyone knows what these are, it'd be really interesting to know.

North Queensferry and the road and rail bridges over the Firth of Forth.

Back in the town, you will of course be treated to some stunning views of the road and rail bridges, but the town itself is beautiful and quite typical of a coastal Fife town so it's well worth saving a little time to look around the town and its harbour before you leave. It's sometimes also possible to see dolphins in the tidal races underneath the rail bridge, so they're worth looking out for too!

The new road bridge being constructed. 

This year (2015), they're also in the process of building a new bridge over the river and it's pretty cool just to see the scale of the engineering works that are happening just now.

Wildlife in the Wind and Rain

The change from summer to autumn has not been subtle this year. Over the course of the last week we've gone from warm, sunny summery days to ... well, today! As always, please click on the images to see them properly.

I can't imagine why no-one was sitting on that bench...

Still, bad weather can make for some cool conditions to take photographs in. A lot of wildlife won't come out when the weather is really bad, but one of the nice things about photographing coastal and marine wildlife is that a little bit of wind and rain doesn't tend to faze them very much!

Breaking waves hammering the seawall at Troon.

So despite the forecast, today we headed south of Glasgow to check out the beaches at Troon (one of my regular spots), Irvine and Ardrossan and see what we could spot. The tides shouldn't have been that great for getting close to the birds (it was low water around lunchtime), but the horrible weather had forced plenty of them high up the shore so we had some nice opportunities. Along the shore we had turnstones and redshanks:

Turnstone on the beach at Troon

Redshank on the shore

I was hoping to find eider ducks sheltering from the weather at the harbour, but they were apparently elsewhere today. There were eight grey seals hanging around though:

Grey seals in the fishing harbour

Of course, it was at this point in proceedings that my trusty 7D + 300mm F4L + 1.4x T.C. combination reached the limits of its weather-sealing abilities and stopped working. No screen, no autofocus, no buttons... Oops. Fortunately a towel dry and a few minutes on the car heater seemed to fix it so hopefully there's no lasting damage. At least it was freshwater for a change too! Of course, that wasn't the only thing I did to the camera today...

After Troon we headed further up the coast to Irvine just in time for the sun to break through for a few minutes.

The beach at Irvine

Having spotted a couple of eider ducks, I decided to test my new walking shoes and climb down the seawall to get down to the beach for a closer view. Neither the boots nor the photo worked particularly well unfortunately and I have a couple of rather large new dents in the camera (and my arm). It still works though, so happy days!

Another couple of war wounds to add to the collection. I suspect I'll never, ever be able to sell this camera second hand. Ever. 

The eider duck photos turned out to be pretty boring in the end, but fortunately a curlew came to the rescue and stood in the sea spray and sunshine for a little while:

A curlew in the waves

After this set I decided I'd left enough blood and camera metal on the shore at Irvine for one day and we headed back to Glasgow via Ardrossan and Largs past some more promising looking beaches which I will check out next time I have a free day.

So all in all it was a pretty successful day out really! Nothing broken, nothing (very) flooded and a few decent photos to show for it. I might wrap the camera in a plastic bag next time right enough.

New Zealand Part 2: Abel Tasman

Looking out to sea over a beautiful turquoise sea

So after arriving at New Zealand's South Island, I met up with one of my old friends from school and we had a bit of a drive out to Nelson and up along the north coast to the Abel Tasman National Park, which at 225 square km is New Zealand's smallest national park. It has some absolutely stunning scenery and beaches though and contains some of the most popular 'tramping' (hiking) trails in New Zealand, and is totally full of kayakers. We only had a day to spend there as we were heading inland later in the afternoon to Hamner Springs, so decided to get up early and get the water taxi from Marahau up to Bark Bay in the north and then walk down to Anchorage to catch the taxi back again.

Abel Tasman Park

Our tramping / water taxi route

There was a bit of wildlife kicking around as well, including a load of cormorants and a few fur seals, but we'll see more of them in later installments of the blog, so for now I'm going to show you some of the scenery instead. Enjoy!

Bark Bay (click to enlarge)

Torrent Bay at low water (click to enlarge)

Suspension bridge over a river

A hidden bay 

We did see a couple of unusual things though, including these stranded siphonophores. These are animals that are a bit like jellyfish but are actually colonial, so they're composed of several connected individuals which all specialise to perform different functions within the animal, much like how a hive of bees works, or an ant colony. Or the Borg I suppose. Anyway, the one we're most familiar with is the Portuguese Man-of-War back here, but I'm not sure what this species is. I know I didn't get stung by anything, so either they're relatively harmless or I got lucky!

A stranded siphonophore

After our whistle-stop tour of the National Park, I was deposited at Christchurch to collect my hire car and was set free to explore the north-east coast for the last few days of my trip, starting in a little town called Akaroa, which is situated in the crater of an extinct volcano...