From: dunbar@boulder.colorado.edu (S Dunbar)
Subject: Trip Report, French Polynesia, Bora Bora, ETC. LONG
Reply-To: dunbar@boulder.colorado.edu (S Dunbar)
Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
Distribution: na
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1992 22:04:09 GMT

Well as I said in my previous post, I would post a report of my trip and
diving, for a detailed report of hotels and such, I will be putting that
one Rec.travel. But I will give details here of the scuba and locales.

My newly wed wife and I went to French Polynesia for 16 days for our honeymoon
the following is our dive experience.
We stayed on 5 islands.

Moorea: 10 minute flight from Tahiti's Faaaa International Airport

We stayed at Club Med ( I would not recommend Club med, see rec. travel
later for details why)

I will first say that we are novice divers and what we saw all in the 16 days
underwater we thougt was amazing, however; if you are an expert diver and
have been to the red sea or micronesia you may not be as impressed, but 
everyone else was seeming to enjoy the dives so i still think it was quite
good diving,  We wore a full 1/8th inch wet suit, more for comfort than
chill, but remember that tahiti is south of the equator august is there winter.

Shark Feeding Dive: Moorea
max depth 70 feet
ave depth 45 feet
visibility was excellent
We dove outside the reef in the ocean, it was called the shark feeding dive
and we went down the anchor line and as we were going down we could see sharks
off in the distance swimming about, they knew it was feeding time.
one of the dive masters brought down this huge head of a fish tied off
to a cable and tied it to the bottom, we were all sitting on the bottom in a 
semicircle and just watched, as i took pitures of Gray sharks, white and
black tip sharks and then all of a sudden this pregnant lemon shark of
about 12 feet shows up, she was hungry and all the other sharks went swimming
off out of her way, we were pretty close about 14-18 feet from the head of 
meat.  Good dive, it was interesting seeing the sharks in such close proximity.
As we began our surface i saw the biggest napolean of the trip, it was amazing.

Next Dive, on moorea,
Wall dive max depth 88 feet, ave 66 feet, good visibility, we saw lots of
moray eels tied up in the reef, ie poking there heads out and looking at
us, more like looking at food, tons of tropical fish, ie parrot, surgeon,
trumpet, grupers, spiny looking fish etc.., and we saw the usual black
and white tip reef sharks.  We saw sharks on every dive

Next dive, moorea to a place called left reef, max depth 100 feet, lots 
of the same some interesting coral passes to go thru and swim around, oh
one thing that i forgot to say is that club med gave us a close by dive
master on our first dive, but after the shark feeding dive we were on our
own, so that was good, ie we didnt have someone holding our hand but it
would have been nice to have someone show the interesting points. more
eels and we saw some eagle rays off in the distance.

Next Island, Bora Bora, hotel Bora Bora, amazing hotel and a great divemaster
named michel condesse.
First Dive on Bora Bora was inside lagoon dive:
max depth 76 feet ave depth 50 feet, visibility was ok, but not as good as
outside the reef dives, but it was still a good dive, we saw all the
fish as before, but we ran into a large school of baracudas, and we saw
more eagle rays off in the distance.  The best part of this dive was 
at the end of the dive and we were in about 30 feet of water just starting
our safety stop and we were watching the surface above and i saw an eel
sticking his/her head out of the reef, so i pointed and everyone looked
(all five of us, bora bora was great because ther diving parties were
small groups) and we saw it, then in the next crevice in the coral
came another moray eel and they started fighting with each other, they
came out of the reef and were wrapping around each other, my wife says
that she evening heard them screaming at each other, i did`nt hear it
but i beleive her.  good dive, we were down for about 55 minutes and did
a 8 minute safety stop  and the stop allowed for some good fish watching.

Next Dives on Bora Bora (3) more were outside the lagoon, we went to max
depth of88 feet and they were all clear dives with lots of fish and
baracuda and another large napolean fish.  We saw lemon shark and
reef tip sharks and more eagle rays.  

Next Island: Rangaroa, in the Tuamoutus, its about 330 miles aways
from tahiti and it was an hour and half plane ride from bora bora,
we stayed at the Kia Ora Village, We dove with a group called the manta
ray club, yves lefebre was the head divemaster.

I will say this about Rangaroa they don't cater to novice, however after
all the dives on moorea and bora bora i wasnt feeling like a novice anymore
i have about 14 dives under my belt when i got to rangaroa, but anyways
the offer two types of dives in lagoon with a max depth of 45 feet or
outside and pass dives with max depth of 130 feet.  We did the checkout
dive with them in the lagoon, we both are NAUI divers and in the lagoon
we were diving with resort cert. divers and it was a boring dive, lots of
tropical fish, but after all that we had seen before we wanted to see
MANTAS,
so our next dives on Rangaroa consisted of pass dive, Rangaroa is an atoll
that has a circle of ringlets that make its lagoon, theere are only two
passes, Avatoru and Tipatora passes.  The lagoon is huge, you could
fit the whole island of tahiti into rangaroas lagoon and still have more
room.  It is the second largest atoll in the world, next to the largest
that is in the Marshall is. So anyways, sorry to ramble but i thought
that it was nice to give some depth to the story, our dives on rangaroa
where pass dives, we would go out in the afternoon as the tide would rip
thru the passes and come into the lagoon at 8 knots.
Max Depth in pass dives were 130 feet, we only stayed there for a minute 
but i really didn`t like going that deep, i was nervous but thought that
we would do it and see, we survived the depth, actually i stayed above
the divemaster so my wife and i only went to 122 feet. but it was still
deep. we swam into the current and shot the pass and the pass started to
get shallower, but it was nice because it did it slowly. we saw tons of
sleeping sharks and tons of fish, and finally we saw about 8 manta rays as
we passed thru, they are truly amazing creatures. we did a 10 minute stop and
went to the surface, i didn't need to do the stop that long, but the 130 feet
was sticking in the back of my head, we all used computers of course.
The  pass dives were nice, we used very little air, plus this place
really filled there tanks to about 3200 psi, they were steel french tanks,
thats all i know about them.

After Rangaroa we left for the small Atoll of Manihi, about 30 minute
flight, we stayed at kaina village, very nice and small manihi has
about 400 people in the village. Diving was great too
they had a pass like rangaroa, but it was more shallow and the current
wasnt as fast, we could stop in the pass

dives on manihi were of two kind,
first we did the pass, max depth 78 feet and ave 56 feet in the pass.
we stopped and looked in caves and saw sharks sleeping, we saw this
one side pocket area that had 3 white tips sleeping comfortably, our dive
master gil put a lite on them and they really didn't more, then came the
manta rays, such amazing site we saw 3 of them, and one looked like it
had a wing span of 5 feet, napolean fish and others.

We left manihi and spent two nights on tahiti at the hyatt regency,
it was a nice hotel, we didn't dive on tahiti, we shopped,

one more thing, manihi is famous for its black pearl farms, for those
not familiar with black pearls, they take 3-5 years to make a pearl and
they are rare, they make it by injecting it with a seed from the
missisippi river bed, and they are black and lustorous, very nice,i bought
my wife one, they are expensive we got a decent but not perfect one for 220
dollars, others were buying nice ones for 700.

Well thants it, i hope you liked my report, it was a fun trip, our
honeymoon and we have lots of picutures about and below the surface
to remember it with.

Feel free to ask Questions about it via email

scott

 
Scott\      /\/\  /|email: dunbar@boulder.colorado.edu
  /***\  /\/*/**\/*|Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology
 /  /\ \/**\/    \ |University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO  80309-0347