second time around

Monday had a couple of good dives, not the stuff of legend, but fun and comfortable. After an early pick-up and gearing up at the dive shop we went on out just past the reef to a spot called “The Shark’s Dining Room.” Visibility was good, and there were plenty of Blacktips and some Lemon sharks to be seen. I dove with Dimitri and a Japanese couple. Dimitri comes from Russia via Chicago, and is a very pleasant and competent diver with a penchant for underwater photography. Since the dive sites are so close to the shop here, they come back between dives for the SIT time rather than cruise to a new site and anchor. On the way back to the shop between dives we saw a Humpback whale breech several times a few hundred meters ahead of us and then swim past us, quite a nice sighting. The second dive was at “Coral Wall”, but could as well be called “Dead Coral Wall” now. The cyclone of a few years ago, and Crown of Thorns starfish have decimated the corals outside the lagoon’s protection. We did see a turtle, eel, and several shark along with the usual fish, but the corals are all dead and bleached out. It is kind of sad to see.

Tuesday I couldn’t go on the morning jet-ski tour around the island as it was sold out, but I did go on a couple of hour tour in the afternoon. It was a little choppy, but lots of fun. The guide, myself and a young french couple. The girl reminded me of my Mary, thin, pretty and a touch of the wild thing. She kept making the boyfriend move to the back and she would just hammer the throttle and fly over the waves. We stopped at a small shallow area where they come to feed the blacktip sharks and rays. I am not sure how I feel about feeding the wild fish for tourists, but it was amazing to see the rays up close. They were a bit over a meter wide and maybe two meters long and would swim right up and bump your legs looking for food.

Wednesday’s dive wasn’t so great. The wind had picked up and outside the reef it was pretty good sized swells. We went to the northwest corner of Moorea for the dive, but the current was pretty strong. Not quite as much as in Tiputa Pass, but then again this was not a drift dive. To add to the hassle, I was a touch underweighted so I had to work to get to the bottom, and then we all hugged the bottom as we worked our way into the current for about 30 minutes. Lots of work, sucking down air and not having fun. We did see a very large turtle, and the usual blacktips, but visibility was poor, so finally we turned around and in about 0.6 minutes were drifted back to the boat. I didn’t think the day would get better in the next hour, and as all the dive sites are along the north shoreline, I cancelled my plans for the second dive.

Now I am packing up for my next leg of the trip, on to Fiji. Today will be a long day, as I go from Moorea to Tahiti this afternoon, and then hang around until my flight tonight at 1:20 AM out of Tahiti to Auckland, connect to Sydney and then connect again to Nadi in Fiji. I lose a day to the international dateline, so from now on my time is not 6 hours behind Orlando, but 16 hours ahead!

Tags: Travel

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