Pitufa.at

Doing a drift dive or a drift snorkel in the pass of an atoll is a magical experience: you take the dinghy out against the incoming tide, hop into the deep azure of the Pacific and watch the underwater world glide by while the crystal clear ocean water sweeps you back into the lagoon. The coral on the walls and even on the bottom of the 15 to 3 metre deep pass is wonderfully healthy and intact, colourful fish hover over their hiding places, always keeping an eye on the nosy black-tip, white-tip and grey reef sharks. These sharks of course also came to inspect the funny eight-legged turtle that drifted several times through the pass today and yesterday–our dinghy with 4 people holding on to it Our friends Bonnie and Paul on Romany Star only have a few weeks left on their visa (American are only allowed 3 months in French Polynesia) and had to keep watching the gribs for a weather window to sail to the Marquesas. As we knew we wouldn’t have much time together, we fit lots of activities into the past four days: a dive around a bommie, some drift snorkels, a nightly hunt for coconut crabs that ended up in Vietnamese spring rolls the next evening, dinners on Romany Star and Pitufa and Bonnie even found the time to cut my hair–the first professional hair cut I’ve had in years, even though she’s not a coiffeur, she practiced a lot on her sister and I gained from that experience Today they’ve left for the Marquesas, we sailed Pitufa back to the Southeast corner (anticipating southeasterly winds). It looked like we had this part of the blue disk only for ourselves, but in the afternoon a French boat showed up, so we’re not the only people on the atoll.