Pitufa.at

We usually don’t fish in lagoons. First, because we enjoy watching colourful reef fishies more than eating them and second, in many parts of the tropics reef fish and their predators have ciguatera, a nerve poison that accumulutes in fish, is harmless for them, but harmful to mammals. Some atolls are said to be free of ciguatera, some kinds of fish too (at least small specimen of them) and the locals are supposed to know, but then we’ve met locals who got it nevertheless. Anyway, as we’ve been here on Tahanea for a while, we thought it would be a good idea to use the predicted light northeasterly wind and the calm seas to venture out through the pass, sail Pitufa for a few hours trolling our lures, catch a fish and come back in. To be on a favourable tide we set the alarm clock to 4:30 this morning and sailed out at 6 o’clock. Of course we got much stronger winds and rougher seas than predicted and after being tossed around for three hours we’d gained nothing but a salty-all-over boat from the spray and a seasick cat. Great. Just when sailing back in through the pass we finally had something on the lure–a well-sized tuna! We’ll have sushi today, poisson cru, BBQ and a curry for the following meals