tuesday 29 february 2000

i love sleeping in the pod. every night my dreams are filled with images from the lab and the sea. outside the wind is wild, the wind gauge no longer works but marko estimates it's blowing at mebbe 70 knots some nights. a local tells us that this is the first summer in memory where the infamous 'fremantle doctor', the powerful wind from the sea, doesn't blow in every day. i dreamt last night of rooms underwater, swimming between the rooms, swimming under walls.

an italian guy who is a skipper of the rottnest ferry visits us in the afternoon and tells stories of crayfish. apparently the waters surrounding wadjemup are abundant with cray. in the 30s his father bought a licence to fish cray for 1 guinea (approx 3 dollars), then a couple of years later he bought a second licence for mebbe 50 pounds. his friends told him he was crazy, that he was throwing his money away. today he's laughing cos each licence is worth about 3 million dollars. it's the skipper's theory that a network of limestone tunnels run underneath the island. i'm remembering my dream imagery of the underground underwater rooms as he speaks. he describes how one day a large group of cray are hanging about on one side of the island, then you don't see em for a coupla days, then they just turn up on the opposite side of the island.

the thought of these tunnels running underneath us is kinda creepy, in fact it totally spooks me out the next time i go snorkelling, because of course now i'm convinced that spirits of dead sailors live in the tunnels (there's a shipwreck of a japanese tuna boat in the reef behind the lab, and i'm thinking what the fuck are they doing fishing tuna around here where there are so many dolphins, and do they use drift nets) and will try to pull me in and i'll be another dead girl in a pond of tears.

ratty is capturing pod pix and senden em to me. it would be nice to make a little animation with em. i miss it when she doesn't send me myself. i like her perven at me, i'd like to set up a webcam at home, to document my fascinating (not) life.