Travels of a Fish Nut

I'm completely disorganised this year. Not being surrounded by adverts for christmas gifts and not having loads of shops in which to go christmas shopping has meant that I've pretty much ignored christmas until it was too late to do anything. So I just wanted to say MERRY CHRISTMAS and a HAPPY NEW YEAR Mum is coming for christmas and we'll be going on daytrips around the island so I should have some photos from outside Stanley to post in the new year. In the meantime, I hope you have a fantastic christmas and I will try and write soon.

The cruise ship season has begun with ships stopping in Stanley for a day before heading on down to Antarctica. This morning when I got to work there was a huge ship moored at FIPASS. If I look out of my office window I can see people eating their breakfast in the ship's restaurant. It's all a bit bizarre!

When you think of the Falklands you probably have an image of moorland, hills and rocks. A bare, barren land where nothing except grasses grow and where the weather is dull, grey and windy. Well, I’m writing this post to tell you that if that’s what you think you’d be wrong. I’m sitting, sunburned, in my sitting room writing this and when I look outside there is not a cloud in the beautifully blue sky. Today I went with some friends to Cape Pembroke. It’s just along the coast from Gypsy Cove and is only a ten or fifteen minute drive away from Stanley. There is a lighthouse which provides a good focal point when deciding where to walk. It is an absolutely fantastically beautiful day, a day when you feel good to be alive. We walked along the coast to a beach and had lunch. This is the view from where I sat: We saw lots of different birds. The breeding season is well underway and every pair of upland geese and kelp geese we saw had goslings. The goslings are always grey and we realised...

Gypsy Cove is only a five minute drive from work and so on Friday a couple of friends and I went there for our lunch break. Last time I was there, you may remember, I saw a few penguins. This time I saw LOTS! We were able to get up really close to one of them: As a slight aside, I keep getting asked for more photos of me so I bravely asked one of my friends to take my photo. Here’s the result: After the horror of the last photo I’ll leave you with a nice little bird although I have no idea what it is:

I have been lucky that on this trip I saw quite a few new species, some of which I really wanted to see. The biggest and best are the moonfish ( Lampris immaculatus ) . . . . . . and the porbeagle ( Lamna nasus ) . . . The species I’ve seen most of is the southern blue whiting ( Micromesistius australis australis ) as it was the species we were targeting. I’ve been getting quite a lot of jellyfish, including this one. It’s about the size of a dinner plate! I thought I’d end with a couple of fish which you can tell are definitely deep-sea species. This is the southern driftfish ( Icichthys australis ). The white patches on the body are just where the scales have been lost during the time in the net. Finally, this is Cataetyx messieri. It’s another fish which isn’t exactly pretty but when it’s pitch black looks aren’t really important! I hope you enjoyed seeing some of the animals of the deep (well, 250 – 350 m)!