Still alive.

Amongst the king penguins in South Georgia in 2020 (thanks to Lizzie Daly for the pic!)

Hi!

As above, I’m still around.

Last year was a weird one for everyone, and a tough one for most. I was very fortunate to be able to flee home to New Zealand from an amazing trip to Antarctica, just in time for a national lockdown. Fortunately, it worked, and that was the last time we had to deal with covid-19 in our province (Taranaki). My partner Madeleine was able to fly over from Australia before both countries closed their borders, so things were fine – great, really, as we had a cheeky little post-lockdown wedding!

Blurry first married selfie.

Turns out husbanding is mostly ensuring your wife has fast and sufficient access to coffee (AM) and wine (PM). There’s probably more to it but, hopefully, I’ll work that out when I get to it.

The Book

With travel very much off the table, I had no excuse not to finally attack a long-overdue textbook on whale sharks for a US scientific publisher, Taylor & Francis. That turned out to be a lot of work, and I’m incredibly grateful to Madeleine, my mum (at whose place we crashed), all the chapter authors, and especially my co-editor Al Dove, for their support and patience through the remainder of the year. Al is an absolute champion, and it was fantastic being able to work day-to-day with a good friend who also happens to be one of the smartest people I know.

I went into full-on hermit mode and shut down my social media (and social life) to get it done. It was a massive project, but I’m really proud of what we’ve achieved. The book – Whale Sharks: Biology, Ecology, & Conservation – is a definitive summary of what we know about one of the world’s most iconic species. I learned a huge amount about an animal I’ve been working with since 2005. Took bloody ages though.

That’ll be out in August. Al and I are just working our way through the first full ‘proof’ of the book now. It’s looking good!

The New Business

While I was smashing my face against the keyboard, Mads was working hard on our new wildlife travel website and magazine, Nature Tripper.

Now it might seem like 2020 was a craptacular time to launch a travel website and… yeah, that would be largely correct. Still, we were able to get a few articles up, and I’m fizzing to work on it more now that the book is nearly finished.

The Migration

Mads and I were able to relocate over to Brisbane, Australia, last month. Her dad had a scheduled knee replacement operation, so we’re providing some at-home support at the moment. His operation went well, and he’s already shuffling about quite successfully, so that’s all good.

After more than a year out of the water, we were pretty keen to get a few dives in too! Fortunately, we were able to spend a few awesome days with our friends David and Simone at Sundive in Byron Bay before the operation. Byron is one of the sharkiest places I’ve ever dived (I wrote an article about it, which I’ll update soon), and it was incredible again.

Mads (right) with a friendly leopard shark at Julian Rocks, Byron Bay.

We’ve bought a car (a Subaru Outback, vroom vroom), so I’m looking forward to some wildlife photography adventures asap. There are some gorgeous areas around Brisbane to explore.

The Research

I’ve done lots of work on whale sharks with David and Simone previously, so we also took some time at Byron to scheme. David is studying the leopard (zebra, if you must) shark population that turns up each summer, and I’ll be helping to start up photo-identification projects on the wobbegong sharks and loggerhead turtles that (might) be calling the place home.

Loggerhead turtle at Julian Rocks

Spotted and banded wobbegong sharks hanging out at Julian Rocks

I’m super excited about that.

This Website

After several years of neglect, I’ve moved this domain over to Squarespace (which is far easier to use than Wordpress was). I did actually enjoy the writing process for the whale shark book, sometimes, and now that it’s done(ish), it’ll be nice to have a place to note down thoughts and ideas to share and discuss with friends on a semi-regular basis.

And here we are. Thanks for reading!