Author: richwest3

Fakarava (Tuamotus)

June 23, 2012

We got in yesterday after a long, hard passage. Ok, only four days but it seemed long. We’re at a nice, calm, safe anchorage today and loafing on the boat while the wind is still blowing hard. It’s supposed to ease tomorrow and change directions. If it does, we’re going to sail 30 miles to the south end of this atoll. It’ll be an interesting trip as the entire passage will be inside the huge lagoon inside the atoll. We’re told that the snorkeling is incredible by the south pass and that there are tiny islands called motus that we can have all to ourselves. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? -Rich

Underway (still!) (Passage from Marquesas to Tuamotus)

June 21, 2012

We’re still underway from the Marquesas to the Tuamotus and it’s been a long, strange and kind of hard trip so far and last night took the prize for strange. We saw phantom boats on our instruments, I saw phantom lights ahead of us, and there were strange flashes both in the water and on the horizon.

The strange flashes in the water are about the only part of that we can explain. There are creatures living in the water that emit light when disturbed (bioluminescense). Our boat passing disturbs them. But these are not like the tiny bioluminescent plankton we’re used to – these are huge flashes. The individual flashes seem to range from about a six inch disk to an eighteen inch disk. It seems sometimes there may be many together making a flash that is several feet in diameter. Sometimes these greenish flashes are so bright we wonder if they don’t have there little fishy flash cameras out to take our picture as we pass – it’s like a strobe going off.

Maybe this bioluminescense explains some of the other strange things we saw last night but I don’t think so. For now, we’re going with UFO. -Rich