S 16-03.4 by W 145-37.6 – This morning we went scuba diving. Special Blend had highly recommended the Fakarava Dive Center and we had booked an appointment the day before while in town. The dive master and his wife picked us up from Kosmos and took us out to a reef inside the lagoon near the north pass. It was just the two of us. The dive master adjusted Christi’s weights, saying she had too much. We loaded into our gear and jumped in.
Today Christi started the day by grudgingly performing a rain dance. Out came the brush, soap and hose. It always worked with the car, maybe it would work with the boat. She only washed the areas most in need of a good scrubbing, clinging to the hope that the rain dance would work and Mother Nature would take care of the rest. Oh, and Brad from Special Blend retrieved our ropes for us. Thank you Brad! Continue reading
Today we went snorkeling in the reef near the boat. There are a lot of areas with coral around here, and yesterday on our dinghy ride yesterday we staked out the spot that we thought looked best. It is huge, has lots of coral, and is shallow so you can see everything snorkeling and don’t need to actually dive. We agree the reef here is better than both the ocean and the lagoon in Manihi.
The coral wasn’t quite as good. It was mostly shades of beige, with some dark yellows and purples here and there. There were a lot of cauliflower looking coral and a lot of long, skinny ones that look like a thorny plant. In the ocean at Manihi there was more color and more shapes of coral, like brain shapes. We also forgot to mention that there was a little bit of black coral in the ocean in Manihi. Continue reading
This morning when we woke up there was no wind at all and the water was smooth as glass. The water was actually a mirror, reflecting the clouds in the sky above. On the horizon, you couldn’t see where the water ended and the sky began. Up until the last couple of days the trade winds have been very strong. We thought around here the wind never died, so the calm has been something of a surprise for us.
Manihi had no bugs that bit, so we were surprised to find that Apataki has a serious mosquito problem. They must breed in the pools of water. A few mosquito had managed to sneak aboard and just about ate us alive in our sleep. Continue reading
Now that things have calmed down with our anchor rescued, we can go back to our regularly scheduled program.
Like Manihi and most other atolls, Apataki is a thin ring of land with a huge lagoon in the middle. Apataki is sort of square-ish in shape. In Manihi you could not see all the way north from the south, but you could see all the way west from the east. In Apataki, you can’t see the end in either direction. It just looks like endless ocean beyond the L of land visible and it is hard to believe there is more land so close by. Continue reading