Dragon Quest  

Every now and then I feel the urge to go snorkelling and see if I can find some seadragons, but so far I've always failed.

Hence this off-topic post about someone who has more luck than me - "No furry-tail ending to this dragon quest".

IT IS a cold grey morning in Twofold Bay, where Professor David Booth and his doctoral student Jaime Sanchez-Camara are hunting for dragons. Not the mythical, fire-breathing kind but creatures almost as marvellous - the spectacular weedy seadragon.

Their boat comes to anchor a couple of hundred metres off the South Coast, near Eden, where mountains of woodchips, harvested from the state's south-east forests, are loaded onto ships bound for overseas paper mills.

Visibility is not great and the water is bracing, but soon Booth, who is a professor of marine ecology at the University of Technology, Sydney and chief scientist of the Sydney Institute of Marine Science, and his student begin their search.

To the average snorkeller, weedy seadragons are invisible. But within an hour Mr Sanchez-Camara has found 15. "These ones all seem much smaller than the ones in Botany Bay," he says.