Fakarava Boat Tour

MFT: Lots of data collection & gorgeous motu
LFP: no snorkeling & not much for lunch

Hallo, ok sorry for the delayed post and lack of pictures but this should be shortly remedied. I’ve made one blog post of just pictures, which hopefully helps people out. Anyways, the students got to go on a cool boat tour of the lagoon & the southern ava of Fakarava and I tagged along (plus ALL of my equipment). We took 3 motor boats and started out nice and early in the morning. Every time we stopped I got to unload, unpack, setup, use and then repack & reload all the equipment. It was a rather tiring day. But the good news was there were never a shortage of helpers for loading/unloading my boxes. It was a really fun day overall and a great way to see the rest of the lagoon.

We started by stopping at a motu with an abandoned taro pit. I tried to get some data on that motu but there was way too much tropical jungle vegetation in the way! But Julia nicely helped me out by wearing the Trimble GPS backpack and walking the perimeter. Then we went to snorkel and fish a bit. I managed to setup my hydrolite and got some pretty good bathymetry while everyone else was enjoying the swim. The fishing was not very successful but luckily there was a backup for lunch. We went to the local fishing traps (that were operated by one of the boat driver’s mother). There was a huge plethora of fish in the traps. From there we went to the southern motu and set up shop. The guides started our barbeque system and I got settled in for GPR and GPS data collection. The motu was perfect because there had been human habitation (and hence clearing of jungle vegetation) but no major construction (no major upheaval of underlying sediment) plus there was a decently deep water table. All told I managed to get some good GPR (GPS was as always more picky). I had managed to leave the GPR wheel on the Seamans so I had to make sure to pace myself with the GPR (it was collecting every .2 seconds).

After an exhausting and hot trek around the island I took a quick swim (away from all the sharks!) to cool down. Then I got to play with the adorable puppy. As soon as we got to the motu and started to tie up this young puppy came scrambling over to greet us. He was very friendly and we all held him for a while. Right before lunch they catered us over to a nearby motu that was all sand covered and very pretty. I got some GPS from there and took lots of pictures. Lunch looked very yummy but since everything had been cooked with fish I stayed away from it and just had my pb&j sandwich. During lunch time as we threw various scraps of food in the water the fish and sharks came in large numbers. I haven’t seen that many sharks outside of an aquarium before. We also saw a huge napoleon wrasse. After lunch a group got to go do a quick snorkel but I couldn’t because I was packing up all my equipment and missed getting a pair of fins (Jan didn’t want anyone snorkeling sans fins because of the strong current).


It was a long boat ride home (about 2 hours) but it gave me at least some time to just sit quietly and think. It’s very rare, I’ve found, that I have time to sit down and think. Most of my day (at sea) is spent on watch or sleeping with eating and cleaning being the other major components. Any free time I have goes to showering, laundry, and blog write up. Forget reading or writing letters, there is just not enough time in the day. We end up doing about 3 hours of cleaning a day easy plus at least 10 hours of watch a day. Somehow there never seems to be enough time for sleep much less anything else. Anyways, the boat tour was a pretty awesome day. It wasn’t too sunny so I at least didn’t burn at all (I did put sunscreen on) but many of the students did burn (I’m one of the darkest skinned people on the boat). We had more fish for dinner (sadly) but people do seem to love it!

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