Week 4 April 30th - May 2nd
The seasons here are different to the seasons in England. The hotter and more humid part of the year is from November to April, the rest of the year it is cooler and drier. The average temperature throughout the year is around 30°C in the shade. All the time we have been in Fakarava there has been a nice cooling breeze.
Hurricanes are very rare in the Tuamotus but occasionally hit Tahiti. From November 1980 to 1983 there was an unusual wave of 8 hurricanes.
On Monday after school we returned to our original anchorage in Fakarava. On the way over we had to have someone acting as a lookout on the bow since the chart was not particularly accurate and there were some rocks and coral “bommies” that were not marked. A coral bommie is a large tower of coral that rises vertically from the sea bed. We arrived at the anchorage just in time to have lunch at the nice restaurant on the beach. From the table we were sitting at we saw a Tahitian Stingray and a Tawny Nurse Shark swimming through the crystal clear shallows.
After lunch mummy and Daisy took the little tender to the beach, I wanted to go to the beach to join them so Mike started to take me over in the normal tender when we saw a Giant Manta Ray. As soon as we spotted it I put on my mask and quietly lowered myself into the water, it was about 2 metres wide! I got out and we collected daddy and together the three of us swam with the manta ray for about five minutes.
I saw every angle of it including getting a close-up view right into its mouth which was over half a metre wide. I could see white bones right down inside its body.
The next day we went to the shop in the little tender but it was closed. On the way back though we saw two more Giant Manta Rays, one was even larger than the one we saw before probably between three and four metres across. We all got into the water with our masks and snorkels. As I got in the large manta ray was swimming straight towards me. Even though I knew that they only eat tiny plankton, when I was faced with a mouth that was so huge it could swallow me whole, it was still quite freaky!
As they swim, manta rays flap their fins like giant wings and they look extremely graceful. One of them got to so close to the tender that the tip of its wing actually touched the tender. When we got back to Golden Opus we saw three more manta rays and we took some photos and video. Mummy nearly got hit as one of the wings came down with great force.
Later on we got the large tender on deck and got ready for our sail the next morning back to Tahiti. Late that afternoon the wind started to get up to about thirty knots and the sea became quite choppy. We went for supper at the restaurant on the beach but the problem was we had to take the small tender and half way to shore both the outboards broke so daddy had to paddle the rest of the way with just one paddle. When we got there we had a nice meal and daddy borrowed a second paddle to get us back.
Next morning we left for Tahiti at eight o’clock, a journey that was expected to take about thirty hours. The weather had cleared up and we had a pleasant sail for a while in 20 knots of wind. The rest of the trip was a mixture of light winds and squalls with rain and winds over thirty knots.
On Thursday we arrived in Tahiti on time and had a nice lunch at the marina. It rained most of the afternoon but the sun came out next morning.