Sweet Tuamotus, Last round through …

 

The majestic Humphead/Napolean Wrasse. This guy is 3.5 feet!

I’m going to ask Marcus to wax poetic about our final weeks in the Tuamotus. Suffice it to say that this region of French Polynesia is most definitely a favorite of ours and I even heard Marcus say he could live there. If fresh produce was available, I might be on board! For the time being, these pics can be a placeholder. These are shots from Tahanea, Fakarava and Rangiroa.

I shot a gazillion shots to finally snag this one! Thanks, Katie, for holding such enthusiasm!

 

 

More Moorea

First reliable wifi in over 6 months, so I will be making a series of blog posts trying to get caught up! We last left off in Moorea (Oct.’18), so here are a few last shots of the island which, although somewhat touristy, provided sweet memories and special encounters. Next up, the remote Austral’s …

We waited a while to leave Moorea for the Australs, which was just fine. Plenty of nice diving with our new tanks and gear, bike rides and friends. And whales. In the wind forecasts there always seemed to be a stubborn trough (meaning squalls and confused seas) situated right across the route. No doubt it’s there most of the time in the spring. We finally left, deciding that it wasn’t ever going to really go away, and that anything that looked halfway decent was probably the best we could hope for. 

The forecast was for diminishing winds, so after a rough start (including yours truly experiencing a rare though mercifully brief bout of seasickness after going forward to set up the check stays at dusk, we settled in and the wind and seas finally did seem to mellow. Too make sure we made it to Rurutu not too late we also decided to fly the Asym, which we are normally reluctant to do at night. All fine on Diana’s watch, but instead of continuing to decrease the winds built on mine. The plan was to wake her up to furl the sail if the breeze tipped 16 knots. It hit 18, twice and finally I woke her. By the time we started furling it was blowing 22 knots and the bowsprit was nearly bent in half. It was almost impossible to get the sail in. When the wind did die, as forecast, we could no longer fly our Asym. 

The Turtles of Oponohu

We are now equipped to dive aboard Allora, so it’s been our pleasure to explore the coral canyons outside the pass in Moorea and we’ve been rewarded with countless Hawksbill Turtle encounters.
Much like the Manta’s belly markings, the ‘mosaic’ pattern on the turtles’ cheek is unique to the individual, so I’ve been getting carried away with my Sony RX100V (in its housing, thanks Marcus for finding a great little camera!) trying to get shots to share with local researchers. ~DS

To Be A Dolphin!

I don’t know quite how to describe the magic of diving with dolphins. They played, they chatted, they rolled and swooped, they came over begging us to rub their bellies. We lost track of our depth and where we were. They came to see us two out of our three dives in Rangiroa’s Tiputa Pass. It was probably better the second time, because it was easier to slow down and take it in, rather than worry that they would only be there for a moment. It was wonderful to swim with them in their element, to watch one jump up out of the water, looking from below. In Baja we always debated which we loved more dolphins or whales (now there’s a silly argument), and it generally depended on which we’d seen most recently. I remember us saying, ‘dolphins, definitely dolphins’ once, and seriously just few minutes later a humpback breached out of nowhere and it was ‘whales, definitely whales.’ Guess what the sentence is now? ~MS

©DS You’d see them from a distance and then in a flash, they’d be swirling all around you, doing all the tricks you maybe once saw on Flipper?!
©DS Master swimmers, elegant gliders, they move as if in a choreographed, perfect dance.
©DS Something to behold!
©DS Not sure whether I was more enamored with their clicking sounds or their smiles?!
©DS They’d go up to the surface to breathe and we’d just wait and hope they’d come back down and find us! We met a family with young enough kids that they were just snorkeling, but they shared stories of these moments when the dolphins would come up playing on the surface as well.
©DS The rostrum is the hard, beak-like mouthpart. Their sense of smell is poor, with no olfactory nerves or lobe in the brain.
©DS This is a world class dive spot mainly because of these dolphin pods, so they are quite accustomed to human swimmers and their curiosity matches ours, or so it seems.
©DS They normally travel from 4 – 10 feet per second, but they can reach speeds of 26-31 feet per second for short bursts of time.
This school of Longfin Bannerfish lends a bit of scale!
@DS Appreciating the abstracts in-between forays with the dolphins!

The wildlife of these remote atolls, which were originally called the Puamotus (poor islands) where lesser chiefs were once exiled, is addictive. It never stops. ~MS

©BB The dive club sends out a pro photographer (Bernard Beaussier), so he has some fun shots which show the scale of these rather large and gentle lovelies and a bit of our awe!
©BB They’d disappear and then WHOOSH, they’d be back in a flash and spinning circles around us! AHHHH!!!

 

©BB The Common Bottlenose Dolphin has impressive measurements; an average of 3 meters and weighs about 300 kg!
©BB Sometimes I’d just pause with my own camera, to be sure to really take in the magic.

Madison’s Tuamotus Visit

We’ve fallen in love with the Tuamotus, as most people do, so getting to share this utopia with Maddi over her winter break was really special. We’d promised a much needed rest, but ended up playing pretty hard, so hopefully her soul was recharged and enriched by the warm, turquoise waters brimming with life and the sun kissed days filled with simple, yet active goals. We ended up hanging out in Fakarava and Tahanea, two atolls with abundant wildlife/wilderness, (always appreciated by Maddi) and we just may have spent as many hours in the sea as out of it! We’d been renting diving gear from a local provider in the south of Fakarava, but once we met up with our cruising friends, m/v Starlet, they ‘hooked us up’ with tanks and together, with s/v Makara, we dove daily.  Pics of these shared adventures will be on the next post, but here we focus on our middle daughter, the shark whisperer.~DS

“Groupers Shining in the Light”

Fakarava, famous for sharks
rows of teeth, sinister, graceful
ominous patience at the top of the food chain
keen senses for a slip-up, a moment of inattention
fish hide in the coral after dark
unaware of a tail poking out
sharks imprinted with curiosity
follow every lead, investigate every anomaly
de facto enforcers of the status quo
stick to the rhythm
you’ll be alright, maybe
it takes attitude to be a grouper
shining in the light
defending your rock
even more attitude to be a grouper at night,
You should try living among swarms of predators
try to sleep or procreate, try to enjoy a little leisure
not surprising that groupers get a little touchy about their neighborhood
food funnels with teeth in their gills,
they present themselves to the world mouth first
Prettier tropical specimens keep a wary eye
slip between branches of coral as though sipped by a straw
everybody seems to know
that the sharks know
they’ve traded decent eyesight and speed
for jaws and uncanny 3D senses for smelling fear and panic
traded chewing teeth for biting teeth
Six Gill sharks eat as little as once a year
(you don’t want to be reincarnated as a Six Gill shark)
Triggerfish, with beaver-like teeth
flopping, rooting, peering under rocks
Bluefin Trevally terrorize the shallows, manifesting classic symptoms of ADD.
Parrotfish seem to know that they’ve been named after birds
fluttering over the reef
crunching coral, shitting and spitting sand
along with their groupies, Maddi and I call “friends of parrotfish”
Moray eels scowl from their caves
Moorish Idols parade along the branching staghorn
huge green Napoleon Wrasse contemplate a sex change
an octopus camouflaged in the rocks
how much brain power it must take to run eight arms
and change color and texture instantly?
I can barely pat my head and rub my stomach at the same time
those unblinking eyes
that gambler’s mouth breathing tube
shoals of shimmering, blue, wide-eyed baitfish
birds above, predators below, strength and peril in numbers
bobbits with scissor-like jaws lurk in the sand
800 species of deadly cone snails
Everything that can be eaten
is
iridescent ink glows in perpetual darkness
volcanic vents in ocean trenches are planning for the future
human concentration suffers from lack of predators
evolution is happy to start over
when our moment of inattention
gets the better of us
~MS

Galeophobia? Galeophilia?

 

 

 

 

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Diving the pass at Kauehi

simple panga, a piece of plywood covering the collapsed fiberglass foredeck

a couple of stops to for the finicky gas outboard, a rag so the fuel cap can be left open to vent

the churning pass looks so much better in 10 rather than 26 knots of wind 

as when we entered, pitching over the standing waves

the usual nervousness, gear, getting it all on

Gary says make the drop quickly to get out of the current

Visibility that transcends imagination, 

a long sloping garden of coral, the vividness of the ocean outside

white-tip sharks cruising the edge above 

out in the unreal blue

fish like butterflies along the reef’s edge, healthy and alive

we regroup and then descend to 27 meters

it doesn’t feel deep, the water is so clear and light

we float along the coral to the beginning of the pass

a narrow canyon, its like flying, whisked along with the current,

sharks passing so near overhead swimming against the inflow 

slick rock and only a little coral, still teeming with fish

parrotfish, triggerfish, dark fish with crazy horns

unnameable tropical fish that will become a part of our dreams

how little aware we were, floating above this galaxy of wildlife beneath our keel

a single tuna shines like it is made of polished stainless steel

we drop into a small depression, caves on one side

the bowl is filled with grouper who have gathered before the full moon in July to mate

they battle mouth to mouth for breeding rights, 

allow us to face off, too, with their glowering jaws

the sharks swim by, poised for something, 

an unexpected moment to seize upon, 

How many fish does it take to keep all these predators fed?

We wait and marvel

then up again over the shallowest rim of the reef

and down into the cirque below, our French dive-master calls the circus

an amphitheater, another dimension

like a poster of the marvelous underwater world that you cannot believe

gray sharks now circle at our level, perched above the silvery cirque

we breath our sparkling air and watch as they come to peer with dark eyes

they demand our attention because they are the biggest, 

but there are so many fish everywhere still by the thousands

we are privileged witnesses to a dream

breathing deep underwater with this bounteous cornucopia of sea-life

dazzles the mind and eyes

like Robert Louis Stevenson’s jeweled pass a century and a half ago

Its hard to imagine this has diminished even a little since then.

~MS

 

 

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