Tahanea

Tahanea

April 9th, 2014

Tahanea _ Tuamotus (French Polynesia)

If you're going to play Survivor Tuamotus, few places are better suited for the game than the atoll of Tahanea.  Nobody really lives here since the atoll is a bird reserve for the local sandpiper who breed on an island inside the lagoon itself, far from any preadator.  Did we see any sandpiper?  Perhaps a small flock... but we never found their roost.  Oh well, we were not there for the birds anyways, but for the fun of diving and more hunting.

Fishing is oh-so-good!  Take this 35-lb Mahi Mahi caught between Faaite and Tahanea.  The head itself, yummy-grilled on the BBQ, fed us 2 full dinners.  

As for the hunting, we've been our daily take of marbled groupers: 2 in the morning, 2 in the afternoon.  When do we stop hunting?  When a fish takes away through a tunnel in a coral head, trailing behind JP's arrow AND gun and JP has to come up for air, then dive again and cut the arrow while I keep the sharks at bay.  Finally, we just have time to hop in the dinghy, throwing in gun and arrow, abandoning the wounded fish to a very happy shark or four.  By the time we motor away, the poor fish is floating around, its tail end cleanly sliced away.  And the sharks are gone!

We were getting used to our little routine of 4 hours of diving per day, long naps, and fish dinners, when 2 more boats joined us: "Estrellita" and "Miramis" and the kids showed us how to really play Survivor Tuamotus.

Rather than drop the hook in the indicated anchorage, a deep channel off the hoa where the corallian sand does not hold very well and where you can't see the heads at the bottom, we pushed a little bit more west and picked a spot between the scattered heads with 4 meters of gin-clear water under the hulls.

The kids on "Estrellita" and "Miramis"challenged us to drift-snorkel the pass at Motu Puapua, just west of Teavatapu... oh what fun to drop in crystal water and let the current take us in, faster and faster as we repeat the dives and as the slack turns into incoming current.  It's like flying a magic carpet, except that the carpet is what we're looking at, a carpet of live and multicolor coral, teeming with kaleidoscope lagoon fish.  We couldn't get enough of it and just as we were motoring back out for our 4th pass, we came across giant manta rays.  Lina and May, the 2 Swedish girls on our dinghy squealed like little girls (well, they are only in their 20's) and jumped overboard while JP maneuvered around the gentle rays to keep them in place.  Just the beaming faces of our young friends were our reward for the day.

We came across many giant spiny sea stars.  We'd never seen them before, but there are plenty in the Tuamotus, especially here in Tahanea.  They are beautiful indeed, all spiny like an orange Christmas tree, but they are nasty.  Not only are they prickly to the touch (JP tested the sharpness) but they destroy the coral. 


The healthier the coral, the more happy, hungry spiny sea stars.  And when the coral declines, the little monsters dwindle and vanish, giving the coral a chance to come back to life.  Another balancing act of nature.