Tuesday 23 May – snorkelling the pass

Another very hot day without any wind. No supply ship has been so no point in going to the shops, and the plan is to leave for Tahiti tomorrow sometime so we should be at a decent supermarket in a day or two.

We decided to snorkel the pass at slack tide with the current coming in, which was about 2:30pm. I was slightly anxious about it as the current is so powerful, but it really was slack tide. We did the left side first and saw some wonderful big schools of fish, like I said yesterday their patterns are like the bird’s murmurations, creating fluid changing shapes. Rowan got some good GoPro footage. We then snorkelled the other side and went way outside to where all the dive boats collect. We saw a few dinghies, and then we spotted Glen who said they had just been swimming with the dolphins but they had just disappeared, which was sad for us. We hung about but the dolphins never came back. So we just did a very long drift snorkel all the way back through the pass. in the narrowest part of the pass the current just sweeps you along. At one point we thought a boat had seen dolphins and we tried to swim back, it was absolutely impossible to swim against the current. It was a good snorkel, loads of fish and a few big sharks, including Grey sharks. I stayed very close to JeldiJeldi!

We invited Patrick and Sara from Ostrika, over for drinks and a snack supper. Their boat is a 30 year old Oyster (English boat made not far from us in Bungay) and Ostrika is Oyster in Swedish, I think they said. He has obviously done a lot of sailing and has circumnavigated once already. Sara has less experience but loves it even though she gets terribly seasick! They have been in French Polynesia for a year already, so they had loads of handy tips for us when we come back in September.

The pass looking nice and calm

Fish murmurations

I got very excited about these bubbles …… they were from scuba divers below us! The bubbles looked lovely so worth capturing anyway