Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels over the years — this wrecked, rusting cargo ship off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, as seen from the deck of the Spirit of Freedom. Shot this on the same trip where I came up with the idea for my post-Singularity coral-reef story, I, Row-Boat. The ship wrecked in the sixties and has been rusting out ever since. Down below, in the shallows around the reef, there's a propeller and shaft so long that you can't see one end from the other end. We were chased by a school of 1.5m parrotfish in formation around us — they executed a series of coordinated right-angle turns, then turned their backsides to us and emitted a cloud of sand, reducing visibility to zero. When the water cleared, they were gone. The wreck really does look like the Parthenon in this shot, I think — apparently it's all but gone now, washed away in last year's storms.
