Welcome to Mackay

My first night here in Mackay was definitely a long one. Boarded the plane on time a 6:20 pm with a stomach full of Subway and a refreshing bottle of Australia mountain spring water. The plane was a Qantas twin turbo prop with 2 seats on either side of the isle. I was seat 9A, a window seat that offered an excellent view of one of the propellers. Dave had placed a co-worker next to me on the flight, but I have yet to remember his name. I think it was also Dave. I really wanted to sleep since I’m still kind of on California time, but the cabin was so full of vibration and noise that sleep could not be had. Dave (I think) and I made some small talk about our experience with MFO (Marine Fauna Observer) work, mine known really and his quite a bit. Despite the noise I rested my head in the emergency position on the tray table in front of me an at least pretended that I was getting some well needed rest on the flight.

Kylie and another MFO dude ( I think Scott?) picked us up from the airport in an ridiculously small red clown car, and we putted our way back to the apartments we’d be staying in for the next 10 days. The two teams are overlapping at the moment so they have a few days to catch us up on what the project is all about. This means that we are having to share rooms for the next 2 nights (still get our own beds though). I had a really good chat with Kylie last night, she is from the Straddie survey, about potential research projects this winter and about HARC coming up in over a month’s time. We also gave Zeus a ring to catch us all back up to speed.

Scott had casually joked about the fact that we’d all be sharing rooms, and the Dave was a snorer. I didn’t pay much attention to this, most people snore in some form or another and it’s usually not very detectable once you get to sleep. This was not the case for Dave whom I shared a room with, I quickly found it. I started off the night by suddenly waking up thinking that we were experiencing an earthquake, and announced it to Dave who apparently was just falling asleep. There was of course no earthquake, my bed was moving from my nervous heartbeat ( I think I’m still on edge about the prospect of being here in the first place). Jet lag will do strange things to you.

Next it was Dave’s turn to do the waking. Only this time the walls were actually shaking….to the sound of the worst snoring I have ever heard. At first I thought my dad had someone flew out to Mackay as well and happened to be sleeping on the floor somewhere (granted I was still half awake). CHRCHRCHRCHRCHRCHRCH…ooooooooooooooo. Good God. How can someone breathe so heavily and not themselves be woken up by it. It was like the plane ride over hear, only it would get quite every 3 seconds between breaths. It was terrible, just terrible. I tried to sleep on the couch but my legs were too long. Finally the snoring ceased for a little while and I used this time to get to sleep before it started again. Then the alarm to the building started to ring in my ear, this lasted for at least 30 minutes. Somehow I managed to get to sleep through that and was again woken up by the ragging beast next to me, and he didn’t sound happy. It was a looong night. I think I’ll go out and find some earplugs today.