In January 2010 I was lucky enough to spend a week on Lizard Island. Lizard Island is a national park on the Great Barrier Reef, about an hour’s flight in a very small plane from Cairns (you can see photos taken on the flight here). According to Captain Cook, “The only land Animals we saw here were Lizards, and these seem’d to be pretty Plenty, which occasioned my naming the Island Lizard Island.” There were indeed a lot of lizards.
I was based at Lizard Island Research Station, helping a friend establish some permanent transects to measure juvenile coral growth. My job was to navigate our dinghy through the lagoon, hammer metal stakes into the (non-living) substrate, stretch a tape measure between them (so that Lucie could map out the locations of juvenile coral colonies) and try not to get too sunburnt on boat duty. I failed somewhat on the the latter – whilst the mainland was getting the worst of the wet season, we had hot and sunny days. As a fish ecologist I know embarrassingly little about coral, so it was good to get a different perspective on the reef, and see how the ‘coral people’ work. On our last morning we made the sweaty hike up to ‘Cook’s Look’ at the top of the island (359m) – the views were definitely worth the effort. On a clear day like we had, you can just about see the white sands of Cape Flattery.