Snorkel South Fakarava Again

Slack tide today is somewhere around noon, so we'll pull up anchor around 11 and head to Tahiti! An 11 o'clock departure time means that we have some time in the morning to entertain ourselves. Mark and Neville from Compass Rosey stopped by to see if we wanted to drift snorkel again. My ears were a little painful from trying to dive deeper than I should have, so I was unsure if I should even get in the water but decided to anyways. It turned out to be a good thing that they stopped by with their dinghy; Rob and Bri needed help getting their stuff to shore so Wizard could pick them up. They'll be on Wizard through to Rangiroa and any other island in between.

Somehow we got 6 people and 2 100 pound bags to shore then the 6 people to the pass to snorkel. The current made it a little difficult to get there quickly. At one point Mark and Neville had the motor throttled up pretty high but weren't moving at all!

The water was a little clearer than yesterday, and there are more grouper! It's really amazing to just watch them sit on the rocks and give you the eye if you swim close. Some are so absorbed in saving energy for spawning that you can almost get close enough to touch them.

More grouper mean more sharks and they were a lot more curious than before. Again I got a little behind the group and at one point counted 7 sharks that were a little bit too close for comfort. Some of them were a little bigger than others, too. It turns out that they were silver sharks that show up for the big grouper feeding. It didn't take me long to catch up to the group with the strong current, and I made sure to stick a little closer to everyone after seeing all those sharks up close and personal.
We saw a pretty big barracuda, a huge Napoleon Ras and another eagle ray before getting too cold to stay in the water anymore.

The Napoleon Ras is a super cool fish (it might be spelled wrasse, I'm not sure). It's a surprisingly large reef fish, big enough that the sharks don't bother them usually. They're really friendly too. We discovered that when you toss some of your compost into the water it attracts some of the smaller ras, which in turn attract sharks. But if you toss enough stuff in (like cucumber salad that got left out overnight, oops) the Napoleon ras will show up. If the sun is reflecting off the water it's really unnerving to see all the little fishes around 8-12 inches long surfacing and feeding on the cucumber then these HUGE blue lips come out of nowhere and take a chomp. Some folks call them the Labrador of the fishes, since if you reach your hand in the water they'll rub their side against it. You can scratch them a little, too, and they'll come back for more.

Ben has some video of us petting the ras, when we find good internet I'll try and post it.