World Oceans Day (July 8th) sounded like a good day to start my round the world trip! I flew into Perth, where I arrived just in time to attend a social gathering organised by ECOCEAN (http://ecocean.org) to celebrate world oceans day and whale sharks. It was a fun informal gathering with music, food and drinks while looking over the beautiful west coast. There I caught up with Brad Norman and organised the coming weeks where I will be helping with his whale shark research on Ningaloo reef.

I also met up with Dave Harasti, I have previously helped Dave with his PhD research on seahorses and had to give him a few seahorse DNA samples I collected for him. He sure knows how to keep busy, just flying over from Sydney for a couple days to photograph the Western Australian seahorse; he is on a mission to photograph every seahorse species in the world. You can check his progress and photos on www.daveharasti.com.

My first five days in WA was spent with Shannon Conway, who kindly offered to pick me up from the airport and I stayed with him and his lovely wife Amanda in Fremantle. Shannon is an award winning underwater photographer and he has taught me lots about different methods and tips for shooting underwater. Check out his website www.underwaterphotography.com.au. We were planning to head down the coast to Busselton to dive the HMAS Swan and Busselton Jetty with Cape Dive. However the weather did not cooperate and I spent the week doing some land based activities and looking at all Shannon’s amazing photos.

I spent one day with Sue Morrison at the Western Australian Museum where she kindly showed me around the vast collections of fish. Sue is the fish specialist at the museum and we spent the day identifying fish, something I am quite interested in. The next day we went to WA department of fisheries, Shannon is planning an upcoming exhibition on the faces of WA marine life. There we had a tour of the associated Marine Discovery Centre; this was a particular interest to me as I have been involved in getting a marine discovery centre for my local area. I also got a tour of the fisheries labs and talked about the research they are performing.

The following two days I spent at the University of Western Australia. I had been in contact with many of the researchers there previously for my Honours project as they are using some brilliant methods of studying fish. For a number of years, they’ve been using stereo video cameras; this allows very accurate measurements on the size and abundance of reef fish. Especially important for studies of Marine Protected Areas; their research is showing many positive effects of MPAs on the fish communities along the WA coast.

Shannon and I also spent a day on Rottnest island. We took some land photos and he taught me to shoot with his Nikon D300. I went for a nice snorkel and saw lots of fish and WA rock lobsters. We also found some inquisitive stingrays at another beach and took some more photos as they gathered around me.

During the week I was lucky enough to be in contact with Grant and Louise Bernstein, owners of the Undersea Explorer, a research and adventure liveaboard on the northern Great Barrier Reef (http://undersea.com.au/). I met them last year when I did a dive trip to Osprey Reef. They are strong supporters of the scholarship and as it happened they had rented an apartment in Perth for the Australian Tourism Exchange. They invited me to stay with them as they had a spare bedroom at a nice modern apartment in the middle of Perth CBD. I stayed with them for three nights and we did some great walks around the city and the beautiful King’s Park.

My next post will be from Exmouth where I will be diving with whale sharks! Can’t wait!