Tuamotos - Fakarava South Pass
Questionable Logic
Ewan Briggs
Wed 1 Jul 2009 07:58
Position: 16:30.36S
145:27.36W
One of the guide
books described this part of Fakarava as tearfully beautiful. So when we were
struggling to see how it could get any better it just did. The pass itself is
pretty small (and worryingly shallow). There is a small village here, which is
mostly now deserted; just two families remaining who run a couple of resorts
that have small and basic huts that you can rent. There is also a small dive
school. For an out of the way place to spend some time it probably doesn't get
much better than this little spot.
Jem, Dad and
I did another drift dive here with the local dive school. Soooo many
sharks!!! Literally hundreds. Mostly grey, silvertip and blacktip reef sharks,
and mostly about 1.5 - 2m long. It was hard to know where to look most of the
time - awesome visibility and so much going on as you're drifting back into the
atol with the current.
We managed to
persuade Mum and Tuck to come with us the following day for a drift snorkel
through the pass. We took the tenders to the outside of the pass, jumped in and
just swam along with the dingies. Again, lots of sharks, and even a few huge
manta rays swimming at the surface as we were heading out.
Eating at the local
restaurant was also fun. It is built on stilts over some shallow coral out into
the pass. Any excess food gets scraped off the plates and into the water, where
the fish and blacktip sharks fight over it.
When it finally came
to leaving this place we decided to head out through this more difficult pass
rather than head back up the atol to the main pass. We took it very gently, and
got down to just 1m under the keel which had a few hearts beating faster than
they otherwise might, but we managed to keep to the deepest section and came
through unscathed.
