Easter- Mission Beach

Across the street from our campsite at Wongaling Beach.

After a long week of independently working on directed research projects, we left for our relaxing Easter weekend on Saturday afternoon. We were heading to Mission Beach, beach area about 2.5 hours south of the Centre. For the entire semester, we've been spending one of our two hours of free time Friday afternoons playing games of Ultimate Frisbee. It's a lot like soccer (same-ish size of field) with different strategy and crossing a line instead of making a goal. Our interns arranged for us to meet up with James Cook University, an Australian Uni which is in Townsville, at the halfway point of Mission Beach. The tournament, a total of four 1 hour games, took place yesterday-Australian Easter.

We hadn't played frisbee in about a month... so quite a few of the students were intimidated out of playing. Both JCU and SFS students registered as either beginner, intermediate, or expert, and we were divided on to teams in equal numbers. Apparently, also in relatively equal numbers of girls. I couldn't believe that a game as mellow as UF would be ridiculous enough to require females on either team to guard each other, and not the guys who might be more at their skill levels. Anyway, I was on a team with several JCU guys, SFS intern Kaitlin, and Quinn from SFS. Seven people play on the field at once- we also had two subs.

The defensive strategy is man-on-man defense, following one person around the whole time. Because the other teams had 3 girls and we only had 2, both Kaitlin and I were on the field for the whole hour for most games. I suppose it was a positive for our team- we covered all of our marks well enough that one of the team captains we played against privately asked us to back off of their girls a little so they could get the frisbee. Our 'hat' (mixed) team won all three of our mixed games- tournament champions. Then we played a short SFS vs. JCU game. In our defense, they had a much larger pool of experienced players to choose from, an all-star squad. We had beginners on our team (me). We lost 3-7, but held our own for a good while.

The rest of the weekend was very nice. The night before the game, we spent the night at a campsite right next to the ocean. I managed to resist swimming until after our frisbee games though, doing some body surfing and playing in the ocean with the other students. What a strange Easter!