Today we went to see the blue lagoon, it is in fact a lagoon inside a lagoon as it is located inside the Rangiroa lagoon but you still have to step out of the boat and walk to get there.
Once in i recommend to wear shoes in the water at all time to avoid stepping on coral, stones or any other thing that might hurt you. The lagoon is in average 50 cm deep, this is like a huge naturally heated swimming pool. When you start swimming you will find yourself close to a lot of fishes, some rays or some young black tip sharks.
Quick lunch on a small island followed by a long swim along the blue lagoon small coral reef. You might see some parrot fish, trunk fish, butterfly fish, surgeon fish, some sharks with remoras on the side...
Poisson Coffre
To end the day the way it should, you get to swim in the middle of a lot of adult black tip sharks, i don't know why but people from the US are always scared that a shark might eat them, they should stop watching TV. In the water, you have sharks left and right it is quite impressive. To thank the sharks for the show we feed them some fish.
On the way back to the hotel we got drenched by a fierce rain, i suppose it was a way to say goodbye as we were heading straight to the airport. Here is a aerial view of the our hotel.
For those who don't know anything about scuba diving, you have to know that when your are a level 1 like me you are allowed to go at a maximum depth of 20m. In Tahiti this maximum depth is 25m because the water is very clear.
Barracudas
That restriction is huge because it is fairly easy to dive quite deep when you are in the blue, you just have to forget to check your dive meter and you will get a nice surprise 5 minutes later: there is no reference point in the blue. It is important to always keep an eye on your instructor because he/she will show you at which depth you should be.
For this dive we went quite deep because we were looking for hammerhead sharks, they are usually difficult to see because they swim near the ocean floor, we had to dive deep to increase our chances to see something. We slowly swam down and were greeted by gray sharks, 10 minutes later the silhouette of 1 hammerhead shark appeared. We slowly came closer as to not to disturb him but were not fast enough to fully enjoy the view. Once he was gone, i checked my depth meter, i was at 33.6 meters under see the level!
Napoleon
We slowly swam up to catch a tide that would make us drift inside the lagoon. Doing a drift dive is very fun but at the same time very tiring when you are not used to the exercise because you have to accept the idea that the flow will take you without you doing anything. Your first instinct will be to start swimming but doing this will get you tired thus you use more of your air supply. Anyhow it is a great feeling to be "floating" in the water enjoying the landscape that appears in front of your eyes. From time to time, you will have to avoid something, at some other time you will have to swim again the tide to not be separated from the group.
Remora
At the end of the drift drive, we ended up in a small aquarium full of small lagoon fishes, it was amazing, if you could you would take a piece of it and bring it back to your home. I am always using a lot of air during those kind of dive, my instructor waited till my air supply was totally empty to give me her emergency regulator so that the dive would last as long as possible, if not for her the dive would have been 10 minutes shorter. I just love diving.
I am a lucky bastard I had scheduled a dive right after my arrival on Rangiroa. We went to dive along the coral reef near the Tiputa Pass that you can see below
I was the less experienced of all the divers (only 15 dives) so I stayed close to the instructor. We went diving along a reef that was going slowly into the blue, when looking down one could see very far in the depth of the ocean. You can find 2 kinds of totally different landscapes in this pass: - on one side the reef offers a lot of small and medium sized fishes with many colors, morays that are hiding in holes, turtles which are eating the moss hidden below the dead coral. - on the other you have the deep blue sea with swarms of fishes, sharks and dolphins.
Before my dive, i had been warned that there was a possibility to see some dolphins but i forgot all that as soon as i was underwater: I was to busy trying to miss as little as possible. I was swimming close to the instructor when we both saw 2 shades far away, with a few palm strokes we were close enough to see that we got lucky!
2 dolphins were swimming side by side, we all swam as fast as we could to miss as little as possible from the great show the dolphins were offering us, we all wanted to bring back a nice shot of them. All of a sudden, 3 other dolphins appeared behind the first 2 and 2 more appeared right behind us. We were all very excited and were looking everywhere.
At one point, 2 dolphins started swimming my way, as i was a little bit above them i started emptying the air in my lungs to go down without scaring them away. We ended up side by side long enough for me to put my hand on the back of one of them and let it slide till the tail. It felt like leather dipped in oil, it truly was a weird feeling.
Then the dolphins decided it was time for them to stop playing with us and started swimming too fast for us to follow. I hope that tomorrow's dive will be that nice.
This week-end we are in Rangiroa, this island is the farthest one on the Tuamotu archipelago. If everything goes well, we will spend 3 blissful days under the sun on a paradise island. The plane did a stopover on the island of Fakarava and on the way from Fakarava to Rangiroa we flew over a big number of quite beautiful atolls. Enjoy!
