Yeah, that’s right. We’re back in Townsville, Australia again. And we’re in YWAM again. For those of you that didn’t read this last time I was away, I’ll just quickly explain what I’m are doing here.
YWAM (Youth With A Mission – or Youth Without Any Money as some people call it) is a Christian mission organisation that you’ll find all over the world. Last time I was here, I did their basic level training school, a DTS. I absolutely loved it and hoped I’d be able to come back one day. Which I now have, since a week back.
Together with Isaac, I’m doing a 3-month school in leadership. Week one has just gone by and it’s pretty intense already. At the moment, we’re learning something that I really badly need, which is how you make decisions. Not a decision as in “should I have a burger or a salad for dinner?” but more as in “what is the best way to see my plan work out?”. I’ve always thought of plans as in “I want to do this, this and this, and then we’ll see what it leads to” but we’re learning to think more as in “what do you want to achieve?” and when you know what you want to achieve and why you want to achieve it, then you can start thinking about how you want to achieve it. I’ve always done it backwards.

Last time I was here, the campus was further out of town, more in the suburbs. Now it’s moved in to the centre of Townsville, to an old TAFE (a type of school) building. It makes quite a big difference. There’s more people around, the beach is closer and there are more rooms than I can count on campus. It’s just... bigger.
Another difference is that I’m not actually living on campus, as I was last time. Instead, me and Isaac are living on the medical ship that belongs to YWAM. This is not the same ship that I went with to Papua New Guinea two years ago, but a newly acquired one. It’s a former cruise ship, and just like the new campus, ginormous compared to the old one. Isaac and I have our own cabin and everything.

Life could be worse. I’m back to one of my favourite places in the world, I’m learning skills that I know I’ll use for the rest of my life, I’m living on a ship in one of the most exciting places to be for a marine biologist, I get to go out for a ginger beer every now and then (a soft drink, not actual beer), I’m back with people I love. It rocks.

We’re halfway through our work here and I’ll be on my way home in two weeks. I know people always say that they can’t believe how fast the time has gone by, but it’s true. I’ll be home before I know it.
Working in Chumbe was one of the most rewarding and exciting experiences a marine biologist could have. The area has been protected for a long time, since it used to be a military area with no access allowed. Now the only fishing going on in the area was ours, and we were amazed by what we found in our traps and by snorkeling the reef. And yes, that fish we're holding is a unicorn fish. The name for obvious reasons.

We were told that there was a chance to catch moray eels in our traps. At first, this just sounded exciting and fun, I’ve never seen a moray before and didn’t think we would actually get any. In total, we got three. I joked about getting sharks in our traps next time. We got two.
It was slightly surreal to pull up our trap and find two dazed nurse sharks and a 1.2 metre giant moray eel (the species is called giant moray, I don’t consider 1.2 as particularly giant) trashing about in the trap. Feelings went from “Wohooo! We’ve got something exciting in our traps! Oh wow – a moray! And sharks!” to “Oh crap, we have a moray in our trap. And two sharks. What now?”
I don’t know how much you guys know about nurse sharks and morays, but I can tell you that the sharks were our least concern in that case. Nurse sharks are completely harmless and the only problem with these two were that they were too fat and scared to easily get out of the opening, while at the same time avoiding the moray. Now the moray is something completely different. Imagine a snake dipped in lubricant, properly pissed off because it’s been stuck in your stupid trap all night, and then taken out of the water where it belongs. Not very pleasant. So to try to get that out of a small opening while it's trying to bite your head off and it's impossible to grab even with gloves because it’s too slippery. Quite an adventure.
Pictures of the nurse sharks aren’t very good. I tried to hold them, but they weren’t very happy and just squirmed around. The morays in the second picture aren’t the giant moray (the tail can be seen of that one in the shark picture), but two other ones that we caught later on. Apparently fishermen that get morays in their traps take them to shore and leave the moray to die on land, because there’s no way that they’re gonna try to get that thing out alive. Which is understandable, and makes us slightly proud that we managed.

The sunshine deceived us into thinking that the rainy season was over, which it clearly isn’t. At 3 a.m I woke up thinking that it was unusually quiet outside. No birds, no cats, no wind, nothing. Half an hour later when I woke up again from rain landing on my face, I fully understood the expression “the calm before the storm”. The wind slammed against my windows, forcing torrents of rain through the mosquito net and onto the floor. I got up and found most of my books and clothes soaked, with more rain continuing to gush in through the window, onto my bed, into my suitcase and creating a smaller lake on the floor. Alert as you are at 3.30 a.m., I didn’t think about closing the shutters to my windows (not that it would’ve made much of a difference anyway) but decided that the best thing was to try to get the water of the floor. So a bucket and towel in hand, I worked for about an hour against the storm. Exciting morning.
When we later got up to go out, the thunderstorm and wind had died down just enough for us to dare to take the one hour trip to Chumbe and rush back again.
Our boat guy felt like the following day (when it still rained quite heavily) would be an excellent opportunity for me to learn how to handle the boat. Since I was in my wetsuit, I didn’t mind. Difficult to steer for shore when you can’t see anything but rain and fog, though. But once again, we managed (with a fair bit of navigation skills from the boat guy, obviously). And when we came back home one afternoon, we found that the trees harboring the spiders had almost fallen onto the house. The landlord quickly decided to chop them all down and the trees took all the spiders with them. Spider Lane is now no more.

So – a fourth of the work is now over and done!
Our first site was Prison Island, or Changuu Island as the locals know it by. It’s an island right outside of Stone Town, where peacocks call their lonely cries and mating tortoises can be heard like modern day dinosaurs. Most of our traps were empty, which was expected, but still slightly disappointing. While Elisa occupied herself exploring transect lines, I spent the time snorkeling and taking pictures of all sorts of interesting animals.

Among all the weird things I saw, this was one of the most fascinating. These are apparently a couple of porcelain crabs living inside an anemone, sharing their home with a tiny clownfish. The clownfish here are nothing like Nemo, trust me. They’re quite fierce, despite their size. Contrary to what you might think, that they hide inside their protective anemone, they swim up to you and sort of grind their teeth at you. You can actually hear their mouths slam shut, with a loud CLOP! One of them decided to attack the camera, so I left them alone after a while. But yeah, Nemo’s scared dad – not so much.

At one point, I got a little bit too excited over seeing a bright yellow butterfly fish, and accidently swam into – yes, swam – one of these sea urchins. Since some of their spines are about the size of my arm, I was quite thankful for the wetsuit. Still hurt, but didn’t leave any mark. Won’t do that again.

This was one of my absolute favourites at Prison Island, a tiny boxfish that managed to get caught in one of our traps. It’s so incredibly cute and really box-shaped (hence the name). 

When we only had a couple of days left, I decided that it was time to live up to my reputation and get my dose of tropical infections. Wohoo! Now I have an ear infection, which is pretty easy to get here when you’re always in the water and it’s hot and humid on land (rainy season). So, now I’m ordered to stay out of the water for the next week. Fortunately, we only had the last few days on Prison Island left and now we have to wait for the next neap tide until we can go to the next site anyway. Spent my time on the boat learning all the fish (samaki) in Kiswahili instead, much to the amusement of our boat guy.

It really does make me happy that we’ve finally started to work on the project for real, and left most of the permit stuff behind us. I know those parts are important too, but preparations and paperwork has never really been my thing.

The other day we spent shopping for necessary things, such as buckets, ropes and weights and got caught in another torrent of rain. The narrow streets literally turned into rivers and what would’ve been a not too long walk, turned into a three hour trip! Every now and then, the rain would just come cascading down from the sky and we would all run in to the nearest shop and pretend to admire their beautiful clothes. Everyone else was doing the exact same thing though. Excellent opportunity to learn some Swahili. “Leo mvua” which means “Today it’s raining”. (The typical Swede, always talking about weather). I enjoyed wading through the knee-deep water, even though I didn’t really wanted to think about what was in the water and instead tried to be thankful that I didn’t have any open wounds on my legs this time (which I had in PNG).
Unfortunately and understandably, I didn’t bring my camera to the markets, so there are no pictures of school children running through the water and men slowly making their way to the mosque through the rivers that just kept coming.

Oh, and check another trap maker out. While we were building the madema, Elisa (my supervisor) noticed that the trees above out heads were covered in spider webs and spiders the size of… well I don’t really know what to compare them to. Smaller than my hand, but bigger than I would like them to be! Just as I was wondering what would happen if one of them fell down, we spotted one hanging on to our traps. I managed to take a picture of it before our human trap maker threw it out on the street.
“They can be dangerous, these spiders. This one? Oh… I don’t know.”
It’s gonna be fun living on Spider Lane for another seven weeks. 

 

Yes, I’m still alive. I’ve been really busy this summer (more than I would have liked to be) and I have prioritized being with people rather than writing on my blog (or anything really). Some of you might know, others not, that I’m not in Sweden at the moment, but that I’ve fled to Zanzibar. I’m not here on vacation or on missions, but to study the fish in tropical seagrass beds and collect material for my master thesis. I’m not gonna go into detail (if you’re interested you can just ask me), but I’m looking at reducing bycatch in dema fisheries (a certain type of wooden trap) and comparing marine protected areas with heavily fished areas. So, I’m gonna spend the following two months on the island of Zanzibar, snorkeling and trap-building.

Zanzibar has a reputation for being a paradise island, and I understand why. Even if I’ve never had a desire to go here until now, the island has a tropical magic on its own. The fact that your taxi driver stops by a local fruit stand to get you a mango just because he feels like it, or that a tropical thunderstorm forces everyone under the nearest roof, even if it belongs to someone you don't know, adds to the feeling of being far away from Sweden.
At 5.30 a.m. the minarets wake devoted Muslims and call for the morning prayer, to the background noise of revving trucks unloading their fish at the market next doors. During the night we’re frequently woken up by sudden rain showers, drum-rolling off the tin roofs. I don’t mind the sounds at all, but either way, they add to my lack of sleep. So does the heat and humidity. Like Fanny commented when we stepped off the plane “It’s like walking into a fish tank”.

Most fish tanks are no way near as beautiful as what I’ve seen snorkeling here though. Triggerfish as colourful as a 5-year olds painting, lionfish on guard with its venomous wings spread out around itself and mooray eels writhing like snakes through the seagrass beds. It really is a bit of paradise, but from what I’ve heard, the entrance fee to paradise is already paid, while here your wallet will notice the cost.

This week I'll be spending buiding traps and preparing permits for my field work. It's gonna be pretty awesome and I'll try to write here whenever possible. Have an additional hundred something fish species to learn by heart as well...