Fakarava Diving with O2

At about 7:55am this morning the dive boat from O2 Diving arrived to pick up Bill and I for our second round of diving, and our first dive in the Tuamotus. Our first dive today took us outside the atoll – out through the Northern pass to the ocean, then a 55 minute dive on the ocean side reef.

Outside the atoll, the ocean floor drops off relatively quickly to several thousand feet deep. As I understand, hundreds of millions of years before the Marquesas were form the Tuamotus would have been volcanic islands rising from the ocean floor. Over millennia, the ocean basically wore off the tops of the mountains so they formed a shelf or plateau a hundred feet below the crashing waves and life moved in and the coral reefs grew (again anywhere from 100,000 to 30,000,000 years for an atoll to form). Amazing that mankind has been able to start to kill off in a few hundred years what mother nature took millions of years to grow! Luckily the reef here is still intact, but for how long?

Another little sidebar – Nancy shared a clip with me a few weeks ago talking about how amazing coral is and how little we still know. There are many species of coral and each year they spawn or reproduce at different time based on criteria we do not understand. One species may spawn this week and another species a week from now. For each species, they ALL spawn at exactly the same time, even when they are 1000s of miles apart. In fact if I broke off a piece here in Fakarava and brought it back to Toronto and put it in an aquarium in a totally enclosed room – it would still spawn and the “seeming random” time as the rest of the species next year (and no they do not care about Daylight Savings Time, UTC or timezones). Coral is actually a combination of an animal (polyp – which is the coral) and an algae, where the coral encloses (farms) the algae, feeds it wastes and consumes some of the byproducts of photosynthesis. Very cool!

After the first dive we motored over to a sandy beach, anchored in 3 feet of water and had a snack and rehydrated. It was 28C in the water and about 28C above. Bill and I had nice chats with some of the other divers – most where here on diving holidays from France, Tahiti etc.

The second dive briefing was very interesting. Thiebaut, the Dive Master explained we were approaching the slack/low tide and for this dive we would start crossing from east to west in the ocean side of the North Passage. He told us all the fish of the reef/atoll have specific and predictable patterns of behaviour with the tides and passes. We would be looking for a yellow fish called a Goat Fish (it has whiskers on the chin) which would be “waiting” for the exact moment the tide had turned and the current started flowing back into the atoll. The Goat Fish would be our starting clock, then we would drift with the tide back in. As we drifted the current would continue to increase and we would pass over a series of “canyons” – not deep but like giant ditches in the sea floor. The passage was between 20 and 40 meters deep.

As I complete this blog, I am 24 hours from sitting in the tiny airport here in Fakarava and the beginning of my journey home. Sharon, Bill and I will go out for a nice dinner tonight in a Lodge south of us on the atoll, so maybe no more dishes for me. It has been a wondrous passage and exploration and this was a great way to cap it off.

Fair winds and following seas for the balance of your travels Bill & Sharon!