Chapter 56: The White Whale

Dan, the MMO that preceded me on my first swing, suggested the best way to deal with the painful boredom of standing watch for 10 hours a day over a period of 4 weeks, is to listen to audio books on your IPod… or for those of you who are still strongly opposed to Apple technology, your personal MP3 player. At first I thought he was just being dramatic, how could staring at the ocean all day in search of all its mysterious secrets beneath the surface possibly be painfully boring? Oh how I was wrong.

The turtles grew old very fast, well actually that’s literally not the case in fact they age quite slowly. As I mentioned in a previous post some of them don’t mate until 50 years of age and not because they are hopelessly inept around the opposite sex. My fascination for these flat backed slow moving speed bumps is about par with that of Monday Night Football, expect for the leatherback simply because it’s unique. Birding kept me occupied for the first week, until I became familiar with the local assemblage, which follows from most frequent to least: Silver Gull, Lesser Crested Tern, Bridled Tern, Little Tern, Caspian Tern, Roseate Tern (pictured), Little Pied and Pied Cormorant, Wedge-tailed Shearwater, Reef Egret, Brown Booby, and only one sighting of both the Wilson’s Storm Petrel and Grey-tailed Tattler. I’m of course still on the lookout for any new winged species, but this only fulfills a fraction of my day. I spotted not just one, but 3 Dugongs on my first post; so I can check them off the list. Lastly the Cetaceans, that is the whales, dolphins, and porpoise, on the contrary are always a welcomed sight, but really the only species sighted near Barrow Island are humpbacks and Sousa (humpback dolphins), and yes Flipper. Oh and I shouldn’t leave out the phyla that need not rely on air to make a living, which tend to leap out into it anyways to either chase prey or escape the gape of a predator.

You would think that with all of these fascinating specimens to seek out each day, no hour should be lost to boredom…but it is. Fortunately I have but one audio book on my personal MP3 player otherwise known as an IPod, and the most fitting one for the scene I’m engrossed in; Moby Dick. I picked up the book a few years back and couldn’t make it past the first couple pages, just a little too much narration for my taste. So I figured it would be easier to listen to rather than read Herman Melville’s magnum opus of the great white whale. There are actually quite a few parallels; Ishmael is a similar name to Michael, he joined a whaling fleet because it meant free beef and board with a chance to experience whaling and see the world, I joined the MMO fleet for the same reasons aside from the obvious whaling, and some of the guys even reported seeing a white whale (although it was a humpback and not a sperm) swimming around the dredgers yesterday…very interesting.

Given the book is somewhere in the range of 600 pages, listening to it should chew up a great deal of my time here and keep my mind from wandering too far, as it tend to do. Once that is over, I've noticed that many of the workers use porn to keep thier minds from wandering (or is it doing the opposite)...perhaps I could give that a shot. I'm not exactly sure what some of these workers actually do, although no doubt they are thinking the same about my job.

Note: the photo of the brown turd arching up for a dive is of a Dugong. Not too impressive an animal from a distance. Another note, Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize “turd” as a word; albeit it crude to use in text but it exists as a word known the less I’m sure.