Day 116, Year 2: Snorkeling and Body Surfing in the Rain
Date: Saturday, August 18, 2007
Weather: Partly Sunny with Periods of Drizzle . . . Again
Location: Revolieu Bay, Epi Island, Vanuatu
I just reread yesterday’s log, and once again I forgot to mention a couple of the highlights of the day. I mentioned that we anchored next to Scot Free II, but I didn’t mention that we got together in the evening on Ranger. Donna and Gerry brought a friend with them, Marie Christine. Marie Christine is a French woman single-handing around the world. When she was in Vancouver seven years ago, Gerry and Donna met her. And yesterday when she sailed into Revolieu Bay, they saw each other for the
first time in seven years. Marie Christine always had a dream of sailing around the world, and shortly after passing her medical exams to become a dermatoligist, she left France as a crew member on a boat headed to the Caribbean. She never turned back. She ended up in French Guinea and bought her boat there. She has been cruising the world since 1986. Since the French have strategically placed islands in the South Pacific, French Polynesia and New Caledonia, she has been able to sail the Pacific
slowly and stop for years at a time to work. Not a bad deal.
We snorkled twice today and that’s just about all we got done. We went out in the morning with Paul and Marie of Ranger. We went back to the same area we snorkeled yesterday, and either I was too easily impressed with yesterday’s experience or things just weren’t as good today. I think I am just too easily impressed. Anytime I’m in the water and see fish, I’m happy. So even though the coral here is mostly dead, there are still some great fish. We didn’t see much new today, but it was still
okay. When Mark and I returned to Windbird, we got back in the water again to examine the bottom of Windbird. We have not done any maintenance since New Zealand, and there were a few gooseneck clams attached to the top and bottom of our rudder. Mark scraped those little guys away and then we spent a couple of hours backing up our photos on our Maxtor hard-drive. We try to have at least two back-ups of all photos, either on our current computer and on the Maxtor, or on the Maxtor and on CD. We
haven’t burned any CD’s for some time, so we will need to do that before we delete the older folders from the working computer. Keeping track of photos is almost a full-time job.
Our second outing of the day was a desperate attempt to see turtles and dugongs. Mark stayed in the dinghy and I got in the water. I held on to a rope as he slowly motored all around the bay as I body surfed behind the dinghy. I could see the bottom easily, but after almost an hour of being drug around the bay, I saw no signs of life. I loved body surfing and surveying the bottom all around. I think this is my favorite new sport. Mark just thinks that I am trying to truly establish myself as
a Pisces, which I am and for which there is really no doubt and no need to further establish this fact. I never learned to swim when I was young, but put me in snorkeling gear and I can stay in the water all day long. Even though I was having a great time, Mark was getting a little bored with just pulling me around, so we went back to the reef to snorkel one last time. It was getting late in the day and it was raining, but Mark was still able to get pictures of Regal angel fish. We have seen
them many times, but have never been able to get photos of them. so this was exciting. We also found another one of those really fat sea stars that I am calling a cushion star. This time we touched it and turned it over to see the bottom. These sea stars look like a coral head at first glance, but the blood red designs are almost geometric and obviously not a coral on closer inspection. The other interesting thing we saw today was a a thread-like creature. At first I thought it was string,
but after seeing a couple that obviously had thread-like tendrils extending from a central point, it became evident that this was just another strange little sea creature. We revisited our anemonefish families that we met yesterday and finally called it a day.
Tomorrow morning early we will leave here for Lamen Bay, just twelve miles north. I am still in search of those turtles and dugongs, and we have heard that Lamen Bay has both. Here’s hoping.
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| 070818 Day 116 Epi, Vanuatu–Revolieu Bay Underwater 2 |
