Cam’s new job and a trip to New Britain

Ok. So many of you may have heard that there has been a new volunteer position on the cards for Cam. As you may have noticed we’ve been a bit cautious about putting it out there for various reasons, but most of all because we didn’t want to jinx it.

So. It turns out that he’s got it, and it’s pretty good. He’s working with a reef protection NGO and this country’s diving industry body (see links to the right for further information). His position is In-Country Representative for the NGO and Marine Environmental and Education Officer for the Industry body. If all works out this position may see him with volunteer work in PNG for an additional 18 months or so. It is literally the perfect job for Cam – if only he was getting paid. Sigh.

Anyhow so one of the things he’s going to have to be involved with is putting in moorings. The idea of using a mooring is that it prevents boats from damaging the fragile reefs with their anchors. It was thought that it would be good to give Cam some practical experience in using the equipment to do this. That’s right. His new reef protection job involves him going to pristine, untouched coral reefs and drilling holes in them (for their own good of course). In order to do this a trip was planned for him to meet a live-aboard boat in Rabaul (of Volcano fame, see Mt Tuvaru's ash cloud below),

East New Britain and move down the north coast of the island (drilling where necessary) over the course of 7-8 days, until they reached Kimbe in West New Britain. But, this is PNG…and things will go ‘buggerup’.

So. With the drill out of action for mechanical reasons, but the live-aboard dive boat otherwise fully functional, Cam had little else to do but make good friends with the crew, and get in a cheeky dive or two...or twenty three. In six days. Of course, for professional reasons, Cam took our under-water camera and here are some of the results.

Here is what a perfect mooring looks like png style, Cam go to see lots of these but not to put any in.


Fish out in the blue water:

Schooling barracuda

Batfish, apprently they LOVE ripe bannana

Fish closer to the reef:

Fire dart Gobies

A juvinile grouper

A very beatiful Lionfish

A mature grouper

A Spotted Sweetlips with a Cleaner Wrasse friend

Some other reef critters:

A beautiful Featherstar

A not so beautiful Moray eel

The always cute Hawksbill turtle

A really teensy tiny little anemone shrimp

And an EVEN SMALLER pygmy sea horse, I'm serious think "two grains of rice"... small grains, and you might realise why this photo is good but not great. You'd need a whole lot of these little fish to make even one half decent seafood stick.

But now for the really exciting stuff: the sharks. We basically saw two types, Grey Reefs the faster meaner, "sharkier"looking sharks, like these two...


and also the slightly smaller White Tip reef sharks that came in a lot closer and let us get shots like these...


Which was, as you can imagine, was pretty bloody cool.

In additon to the awsome crew Cam also had the company of a holiday making couple, Martin & Jo. Martin and Jo actually work on a boat (skipper and chef) but still love the water enough to take thier holidays on one (Well Martin does anyway, I seem to rember Jo saying someting about thier next holiday being very much on dry land.) Martin is the one staring through the seawhip and Jo is posing by the sea fan. These guys were heaps of fun and helped call in sharks on more than one occasion.



Here is a recording of the one afternoon with a sunset that we actually managed to see, the weather was not so great, but this one kept up going through the grey days.


But perhaps what helped us going most of all were the crew of the boat who were simply amazing I can't begin to thank them enough nor do I have what could be called "flattering" photos of them all... but here are a couple that I hope they'll like

This is a great demonstration of Jonahs trade mark bubble rings.

And this is the man himself (looking a little lost without his scuba gear, left) with Joe, Agnes and Pauline.

Once back on land Cam met up with a lot of important people that he's going to have to work with and amongst other things got a chance to help put one of the dive resorts day boats back in the water, with what can only be described as "a crane that was JUST big enough" thankyou to all the crew at the resort who also made Cam feel welcome.


Anyway we'll leave you with this final jem form Walindi which make us think that Cam might only have to keep implimenting the current policy to ensure that PNG's reefs are well protected.