Sting Rays and a Shark

0800 Position 16-32S 151-42W. Anchored at the southeast end of Bora's lagoon.

A while back I wrote about our inability to find a French press here in French Polynesia. George Losey, a friend and reader of this blog, wrote and informed me that we couldn't find one because the French do not use the French press to make their coffee. What's up with that? Is there a conspiracy to misname products? French press, French toast, French fries. I understand there is nothing French about any of these. My English friend Ellie Goldsmith insists that the English do not eat English muffins. Do they eat Danish pastries in Denmark? How about Eskimo Pies, Belgian waffles, Brussel sprouts, Quaker Oats, and the Spanish fly? Solving riddles such as these consume us aboard Van Diemen… Coincidentally, Robbie tells us that as a kid he went to a Quaker school in Hobart, and the Headmaster's name was William Oats.

The water here is lovely, and we are spending a lot of time in it. Mike spent a good part of the morning yesterday scrubbing two months of scum off of Van Diemen's water line. Rob and Renee pumped up their inflatable SUPs and played on them. When the sun was high we moved Van Diemen a half a mile further south, closer to the drift dive on the south end of Motu Piti Aau.

I've done this drift dive half a dozen times before, and it is always different. One year it was full of live sea urchins with their long black spines. The next time it was full of sea urchin shells. Sometimes it is full of fish. The water here is super clear, and visibility is almost 200 feet. This afternoon it seemed empty until we drifted down close to Faroona Point where we encountered a school of nineteen spotted eagle rays. They were just moseying along together and seemed unconcerned about our presence ten feet above them. They would occasionally joust with each other and do loops. It was very cool. We've encountered rays here before, but never in a group. A little later a five foot black tip shark came along. He stuck around for about five minutes and we could get to within about ten feet of him. I picked the wrong day to leave my GoPro camera on the boat.

Renee proposed a picnic dinner on the beach, so we made some grilled chicken, grilled onion, and potato salad bentos, packed them up together with our pre-made rum and juice cocktails, and headed in on the dinghy. The trees blocked the wind on the beach so it was pretty warm in the afternoon sun, but we found some shade to lay out our picnic blanket. We watched the sun set over Bora Bora with Van Diemen sitting regally in the foreground. The ants and mosquitoes enjoyed the picnic as well.

----------
radio email processed by SailMail
for information see: http://www.sailmail.com