New Seagrass Monitoring Site – Black Ledge

Do you know what a particularly extreme hour of the morning is?  4am-ish.  That’s the inky hour that volunteers set their alarms for in order to arrive at Black Ledge – east of town – at the 5am call-time. So impressive!

(So early the group photo had to be taken in the dark!)

This was the second seagrass monitoring trial at the new site in the Yawuru Nagulagun Roebuck Bay Marine Park. The Broome Community Seagrass Monitoring Project sends a big thank you to the core group of trained regular rock star volunteers who came along for this second special trial!

As we walked out to the site we were washed in the soft glow of the pre-dawn light and then saw a magnificent sunrise to our right, with the luminous moon shining down on our left. In between the two, the seagrass looked fantastic! The volunteer teams worked quickly and expertly and the second trial was a great success with all data collected, and a good time-buffer to boot before the tide swept back in. Great work team!

As if to reward the volunteers for their awesomeness, nature gifted the group several sightings of some extraordinary octopuses! Those things could move! The foot-long creatures swirled over the mud and rocks, tentacling around with their eight attractive legs, and changing colours before our eyes – that’s right, these guys were swapping hues every second or two, like chameleons. One moment they were very dark brown, next they whipped it up into a light sandy white. Show-offs! We loved it!