Today, we woke early, and caught the monorail to the KL Sentral (the main station), where after searching for ages… we caught the “official” bus.

An hour later we were at the track, and we walked around checking the usual bike stuff out, trying to find where to get our caps and t-shirts that were in our ticket deals… It wasn’t easy… they wanted my passport AND credit card as proof of who I was… Lucky I had it!

Anyway, on to the qualifying. An exciting day, we popped from view to view, checking out the best bits of the track, and figuring out where we want to see on raceday.

The noise of a MotoGP bike is something astounding… it hurts! I cannot believe the sound that those bikes make… stunning… the video below does not do it justice….

We settled for the back straight, as besides seeing bikes do 300km per hour, you can also see about another 1/3 of the track… so a good vantage point… At one point I was watching Rossi come into a very tight corner, and bless him… he crashed… He was fine, but it has put him quite far down in position.

I was experimenting with HDR, a technique that involves taking the same photo with several different shutter speed settings and then merging them into photoshop… Such as, this photo below.. which is actually made up of 8 separate photos merged together… I would like to know what you think..?

After qualifying, we headed out of the circuit to catch the bus home… we had to wait 90 mins before one appeared, and then 90 mins to get back to the city centre….JOY!!

Then we decided to take a walk to a market… After miles of walking and being sent in the wrong direction by some “helpful” person, we found it…. TAT!! They sold the cheesiest crap… we left, and went home to bed, ready for raceday!

x

SD

We left Koh Tao at 3pm on the high speed catamaran.  This boat usually takes 2 hours to get to the mainland, but 10 minutes after we left….. it was dead in the water.
After a while, the boat engineers managed to get the thing running on half power, and the ferry took 5 hours to get to Chumphon..
Luckily, we had a 4 hour window in between the ferry and train we needed to catch… so we arrived at the train station with 30 mins to spare.
Once the train had pulled up, we searched for our seats / beds for the 10 hour journey to Bangkok. Our seats were in the 2nd class carriage (but at least we had air con!)…
As you can see below… it was a bit tight, and click on the last picture to see what I was saying at the time…

Where the time goes  ..I just dont know….

We’ve been busy diving and finishing off the last of the transplants at Junkyard which are now looking fantastic.  All of the trays have been filled and we’ve only got a couple of the rope nursaries to move.  So only a few more visits should be needed in order to transplant everything.

The really good news is that  ‘Buoyancy World 2.0’ has finally been deployed.   We were beginning to think it would never happen due to the multiple cancellations and monsoon season looming.

Here is a video of the ship going down…

And here are some pics of it underwater with some of our nursery transplants…