Australian East Coast Cruise

The chance to help sail a yacht from Sydney to the Whitsunday Islands over a few weeks of early winter seemed like a great way to escape from the short days of Tassie's winter.  I don't usually mind winter at all, hiking in the snow, clear crisp cold weather.  But it was wonderful to be warm and go snorkeling as often as possible.  It has been a while since I tried to identify tropical fishes on a coral reef and it took some practice.  Each snorkel meant that I came back with my head full of mental notes like, "some sort of butterflyfish with diagonal stripes - black and white; a wrasse with an orange beak-like snout; a bunch of little white guys with yellow quarters on the front."  Usually I would forget some salient point that would not allow me to identify very many fish.  But after many, many times in the water I had a few named and even fewer memorized.  But it was a great distraction and if I can't name them all, at least I have a great appreciation for the diversity!  A few illustrations:

Melaleuca Species List

Mount Rugby viewed across Melaleuca Lagoon

I was able to stay at Melaleuca in the remote SW of Tasmania for nearly an entire month.  We were volunteering for the Parks and Wildlife Service as well as spending a week hiking out to the SW Cape.  What a magic month!  We had a bit of everything for weather (it was March, still summer) and the wildlife was the real highlight.  Here follows our species list for the time we were there and hiking the south coast.

Species List for Melaleuca and the South Coast (March 2016):

Antechinus sp.

Yellow-throated Honeyeater

Orange-bellied Parrot

Crescent Honeyeater

Welcome Swallow

Tiger Snake

Black Currawong

Grey Shrike-thrush

Striated Feildwren

Ground Parrot

Green Rosella

Forest Raven

New Holland Honeyeater

Red-capped Plover

Hooded Plover

Silver Gull

Pacific Gull

Masked Lapwing

Southern Boobook

Grey Fantail

Tasmanian Thornbill

Sooty Oystercatcher

Pied Oystercatcher

Tasmanian Scrubwren

Silvereye

Superb Fairy-wren

Sulphur-crested Cockatoo

Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoo

Metallic Skink

Great Cormorant

Black-faced Cormorant

Bottlenose Dolphins

Pademelon

Spotted-tailed Quoll

White-throated Needletail

Southern Emu-wren

Ring-tailed Possum

Australasian Bittern

Swamp Rat (a marsupial!)

Pacific Black Duck

Scrubtit

Brush Bronzewing