On Visitation Rights and Bottomless Pits

Well, we have had our first official visitor here in Arrecife. Mark, one of my friends, roommates, and fellow Moorea trippers from UCLA came to visit over the weekend. I took a couple of days off from work and we took a grand tour of the island, both above and below the water, having ourselves a pretty good time - I don't always get to play tourist with a fully clean conscience around here, so it was a nice change.

One of the highlights was definitely our dive at Babylon, a site at the northeastern end of the island. Our original plan was to do a night dive offshore from a friend's house near where I live, but when we couldn't find a second dive light for Mark that plan got shelved. Instead we kept the tanks we had rented and decided to explore a new site. My roommate Julia had recommended Babylon a while back, and I had always wanted to dive in East End anyway, so the plan was set. After a bit of research to find the put-in location and the proper buoy (every dive site on this island is marked by a white ball buoy... which means there are hundreds, if not thousands, of buoys surrounding our shores), we drove across the country in about 45 minutes.


The website we found said the launch site was just west of the roadside monument to the Queen on Her Majesty's Highway (a somewhat run down two-lane road). We pulled off in a break in the trees and sure enough, there was a white buoy right offshore... and another... and another. We decided to split the difference and go for the center buoy (the fact that it was closest to shore had nothing to do with it, I swear). After a surface swim of about 30-45 minutes into a slight wind and swell, we finally made it to the buoy and started our descent.


At 40 feet we reached the top of the main reef and started our exploration. There was a bit of a dropoff nearby, so we started in that direction.


That "bit of a dropoff" turned out to not have a visible bottom. We went as far as 104 feet (108 feet for Mark, as he is so quick to point out), and still no end in sight. Remember that our island is more of an underwater mountain with sheer cliffs on all sides. Something tells me we found one of those cliffs. Anyway, these are some crazy green sponges I saw along the wall. The odd green and black patterning is not actually an artifact of the camera or any photo processing. The sponge really did have a weird dark shading all its own.


Coral. Obviously. Again.


After hitting our new personal depth records we headed back to slightly shallower waters to make the most of our remaining air (you use more air at greater depths, so we didn't stay down all that long). Soon after coming up, we saw a sea turtle cruising through the reef. This one was a big shrimpy as far as sea turtles go - obviously a young one - but it was still pretty cool.


A pair of groupers hiding under an outcropping of coral.


A closeup of gorgonian polyps, which would sway in the water like flowing hair. Very pretty.


My ever-mature dive buddy, who decided a diseased and half-eaten sea fan would make a great foreground.




Having said that, I have to admit that Mark certainly was good at finding filefish. While many varieties can reach lengths of over a foot, these guys were barely an inch and a half. The first one was living around a length of purple rope sponge. It matched the sponge in color and texture, and swam to the opposite side of the sponge as soon as it sensed danger. Of the three pictures I took of this guy, this was the one that showed the most of his body. Similarly, the second picture shows another well-camouflaged filefish hiding in a gorgonian. Again, it matched its home's color and texture, and again it was a pain in the butt to get a picture, so again this is the best I have.


Excurrent siphons of a sponge. Sponges filter feed by sucking water in through the pores on their sides (incurrent siphons), and out through the larger holes on top. To help the kids relate, we've started referring to them as the "Brita filters of the sea" - something with which our Winchester-Swann clientele is very familiar.


How many animals can you see in this picture? If you said three, you're right. In all honesty, I didn't even notice the tiny fish until I looked at the photo on my computer back home. An inch-long black fish on a black sponge at 40' doesn't exactly stand out in a crowd.

The next few posts will most likely be using pictures from this and other dives Mark and I did, as I will be busy with teaching CAOS summer camp for the remainder of the week and possibly more in the future, meaning 60+ hour workweeks and little time to goof off like this. Oh well. It was definitely fun while it lasted.