Scuba Jim
Contributor
Episode II: Ye Maidene Voyage of the Goode Shippe Tahiti Aggressor
Well after saying goodbye to Rurutu I headed back to Tahiti and a night in the Sheraton. The rest of the team on the Aggressor arrived from LAX that evening and we all went out for a French/Polynesian/Chinese kinda dinner. The thought of spending the week on a boat with 16 Americans gave me great pressure, I mean pleasure! Luckily there was one more European on the boat. Ahhh! She was French!!! Only kidding! Dont take it personally, people - I hate everybody!
So, how come I got to go on the first trip of the Tahiti Aggressor? Cos it's my job, dammit! (And I paid the prerequisite amount of loot!)
The next morning at 0730 we flew to Rangiroa. The joys of 18 people with 500 tons of gear trying to get on a plane that could only fly with 100 tons of luggage. Still, we got there in the end. We then went to a small hotel called the Raira Lagon for breakfast and went to visit a pearl farm. My dear wife said she did not want any pearls, which came as a relief. She wanted diamonds instead. Yeah, right. Before lunch we went to the boat and found our cabins. If you any of you have been on the Fiji Aggressor then you will be familiar with the Tahiti Aggressor, as they are one and the same. Except they now have an extra cabin, so she takes 18. Well, youve gotta make money.
Anyway, shes a 106ft long, 30ft wide cat with 2100hp jet drives on each side. She can do over 20kts, but you would run out of fuel before you left the harbour, so they tend to cruise at 11-12kts. She has 5 cabins down the port side and 4 on the starboard, all on the main deck. Each has a double bed below, single above, in room washbasin and an en suite shower room with dunny. All have large picture windows except the new cabin which has no windows at all, so offers a lovely view of the wall instead.
Upstairs is the galley and saloon. (Point on semantics, here, for the Americans amongst my dear readers. A salon, as you call a saloon, is where ladies have their hair done. A saloon is a sitting/drinking/eating area. As in Last Chance Saloon. After all, John Wayne didnt stroll into the Last Chance Salon and say Get off your hoss, were having a cut & blow dry did he? No.) Anyway, in the saloooooooooon are tables & chairs for eating off (though prefer a plate myself), a couple of sofas, a TV, VCR, music centre etc etc And, vital for a lush like me, a bar that can be sat at inside & out, so if you need a beer and are kitted up ready for a dive you dont have to take it all off to go and get one from inside. Very important. At the back is a shaded area with BBQ & hot tub. Great for making that Nitrogen boil in your blood after a dive! On the very top deck is a huge sun deck with loungers, hammocks, tables, chairs, that sort of thing. Lower deck houses engine rooms.
The dive deck is aft of the cabins, and is huge, wot with this being a cat.
2 huge camera tables, charging facilities, rinse tanks etc and the stupidest idea for going diving in the world.
A dive tender that goes up & down a hydraulic ramp at the back of the boat. This is VERY important if you dont want to get wet, but in a chop the tender is a pig to get back into the docking bay. Quite frankly its bollocks.
The quicker they get 2 RIBs the better, as the tender is aluminium (note correct spelling, Americans!!) and the kind of diving you are doing in the Tuamotus is the right kind to bring the tender down on your bonce with a crash and knock your brains out. Also, with 18 divers, 2 dive guides and 2 boat handlers, there just aint room enough for everyone. And there were, if I recall, at least 14 people with BIG camera rigs. As the old saying goes: Big Camera, Little .
Anyway, all very nice, and I wont bore you with the day to day running of the ship; if you have been on an Aggressor, theyre all much the same. And similar to a Peter Huge operation (I wonder how long itll be before he tries to get a boat in there?!)
So, this was the first trip, and we relied on the expertise of a French guy called Pierre, who had been diving the Tuamotus for 20 odd years, to show us about. Our trip was a day shorter than normal Saturday Friday, so we only had 4½ days diving instead of 5½. For reasons I wont bore you with we had to return to Rangiroa a day early as 2 people had to fly back to Tahiti on business, so we spent Saturday & Sunday at Rangiroa, Monday at Apataki Atoll, Tuesday at Toua and returned to Rangiroa for Wednesday & Thursday.
Basically, the diving is a similar kind of diving at all the atolls in that you are diving walls on the outside, the entrances to passes and doing drift dives through the passes into the lagoons. You just happen to see different things at different passes. Rangiroa is the most famous place for diving in the Tuamotus, but by sheer coincidence, it had the most disappointing diving. We just didnt really hit it right.
There are 2 passes at Rangiroa, Tiputa and Avatoru, about 5 miles apart. You can do 3 or 4 different dives on each pass. We saw numerous grey reef sharks, turtles
mantas (too far away for me to foto) and some saw dolphins (I heard them, but didnt see them) We also saw schools of barracuda, jacks, snapper, bass, that kinda thing. At Avatoru you also see hefty silvertips.
I should say the biggest was perhaps 8ft.
The coral within the channels is pretty dead, but on the reef walls they are healthy, but not very interesting. A limited variety of species and not particularly interesting formations no wonderful swim throughs, gullies etc And no soft corals or fan corals
After our sail to Apataki thats where the fun starts! There is just one pass at Apataki. Tehere. It is about 100 yards wide. You can see from this image
that when the water pushes out from the lagoon into the open ocean the force of the water creates huge waves about 5ft-high. This is due to the amount of water being forced out of the lagoon by the tide. The same thing occurs on an incoming tide; the waves can be created for up to two miles into the lagoon by the force of the water entering through the pass. As you can imagine, a few billion tons of water trying to squeeze through a gap 100m wide has to move pretty darn fast, and this creates some incredible currents. More of that later!
The first dive we did at Apataki was along the reef wall on the southern side of the pass. This was the best bit of reef I saw during the entire 3 weeks I was in Tahiti. It was almost interesting!
However, the fish life was prolific. First up we had a monster school of big eyes, perhaps a couple of thousand swirling about us.
Usually you find these in small caves and overhangs
during the day, but this lot were quite content to swim about in the open; safety in numbers, eh? Just past them we came upon a school of jacks, which of course did the decent thing and swam around in a circle above our heads
We moved closer to the edge of the pass, but the tide was pretty slack, so diving was easy, but viz was down because it was the end of an outgoing tide, so a lot of sand was floating in the water. Here we came across a school of black surgeon fish. I have never seen so many surgeon fish in all my life.
There were tens of thousands of them swirling along the drop-off and on the top of the reef. You could be totally engulfed by them. Awesome.
We then went to the top of the reef and hung around some holes in the top of the reef, where I saw these nice butterfly fish.
If you like butterfly fish, this is a great place lots of different species to see.
The second dive at Apataki was in Tehere pass on an incoming tide; the tide had only been running for about 1 hour, so was not up to full force when we dropped in at the outside of the pass. We scootled along the pass at about 1 kt and slowly picked up speed as we entered a channel perhaps 50ft deep and 20ft wide, sloping gently upwards. We passed small schools of jacks
surgeonfish, some surgeonfish
I was by coincidence at the front when I looked up along the dge of the pass and saw about 20 sharks near the surface, by a small wall. I gestured to everyone else and we then hooked in (dont have a reef hook and want to dive Tehere Pass? Buy one!) and slowly clawed our way up the wall. No easy task in a 2½kt current and holding a camera with an expensive dome port! At the base of the mini wall was a cave, more like a slit in the wall, with an entrance at both ends, The cave was stuffed with grey reef sharks. 30 or 40 at least. Others would swim on from either end and come out the front. The current picked up and when you are as slim as me (Scott will testify to that fact!) you do create quite a barn door effect. The lump of dead coral I was hooked into, perhaps 4ft x 6ft and 3ft high was quite literally lifted off the ground by the me & the current and me & my new found friend started bumping off along the reef. Unfortunately the u/w videographers did not see this, but a few of us had a laugh afterwards! As sort of proof, a couple of quotes from Paul Sloan, director of Tahiti Tourisme in the US: I'd especially like a shot of you dragging a 2-ton coral head down the channel! (PADI Project AWARE is always on the lookout for good eco-poster material...!) and U/W boulder-dragging is truly an untouched niche...! As you can imagine the current was ripping! Most people were looking with intent at the cave, but on looking down into the pass below I was amazed to see hundreds and hundreds of grey reef sharks hurtling along the bottom on the incoming tide. There were %*@#ing squillions of the things! I have never seen some many sharks in all my life. Anyway, air was running out and we flipped over the top of the wall and proceeded to drift over undulating beds of coral into the lagoon shallows to be picked up by the tender.
So, third dive. Well it had to be in the same place. And you thought the current was strong on the previous dive? Pah! It took about 5 minutes to get to the shark cave, whereas before it had taken about 20. We reckoned we were doing 6 kts down the pass. Holy Smoke! And there, ahead of us, was one of these famous Walls of Sharks The entire pass was blocked by hundreds of grey reef sharks, swimming in a lazy circle up one side of the pass across and down the other. This is where Pierres dive briefing did not go quite to plan. With a 6kt current you aint got much time to think, so we hooked in and attempt admire the view. However we were hooked in up current, so the only way we could see them was to turn our heads. This did one of three things. 1) It ripped your mask off your head. 2) It filled your reg up with water. 3) It ripped your mask off your head and filled your reg up with water. It therefore made looking at them very difficult and taking photos of them next to impossible. You couldnt turn around enough and anyway the current was running so fast your strobe arms just bent all over the shop. Still, I managed to croon my neck round and look at them without drowning! Some were breaking formation and swimming towards us, getting to within a couple of inches of my fins at least before darting off. It was impossible to take pictures, and I tried gesturing at Pierre that we should unhook, pile through the sharks and hook on down current of them. Then maybe we could get a picture or two of them, and perhaps fire of a couple of shots as we charged through the middle of them. Anyway, I couldnt get his attention, and it all went pear-shaped. We just sat there and did nothing! In the end I unhooked and was flipped by the current over the top of the pass and along the coral on the sides. There was no way I could get back and no way to hook on as the hook just ripped the coral out of the reef. I just hope that they have no resolved the way these dives are done. Because the way we did it was not the way to do it!
I got no decent pictures at all - the conditions were almost impossible, with the current bending strobe arms all over the shop, masks & regs filling with water, trying to secure a firm hold, etc etc. But believe me, it happened! Anyway, that was the third dive at Apataki.
That night we sailed to Toau Atoll. We moored to the south of Utogi pass, and beyond a small motu could be seen Fakatahuna Pass. Pierre called it Fakatahuna Diabolique because he said it was just fantastic.
The first dive we did was along the edge of the reef at Utogi and then into the pass. The usual stuff, with lots of schooling fish,
grey reefies, some mantas (too far away to photograph) and the such. The pass was very interesting. A series of parallel channels running into the pass, scoured almost clean of any living coral. Every so often you would pass over a large bowl that had been hollowed out of the reef substrate. The second dive was at Fakatahuna, at the mouth of the pass. We saw 1 grey reef shark at a cleaning station and that was about it. The second dive we went into the channel and did a very interesting drift dive over perhaps the most interesting corals that I saw all trip lots of boomies sprouting from a sandy bottom covered in fish. We saw no sharks! Pierre said that the reason there were no sharks about was because there was probably a shark-eating shark out there tiger or great hammerhead enjoying chow time. Anyway, these 3 dives were nowhere near as good as those at Apataki, but then few would be.
That night we sailed back to Rangiroa. We should have been going to Fakarava but didnt because we had to get 2 people back to the airport to fly back to Tahiti. So the last day was spent at Avatoru and Tiputa passes. See above for details on them!!!
On the final night of the trip (Thursday night) we went to the Kia Ora Hotel for dinner and all got slammed. The rest of the contingency returned to Papeete the next morning but I hung about in Rangiroa for the day and flew back in the afternoon. We all had dinner together at the Sheraton and the rest of them flew off to LA that night.
To sum up, was the Aggressor good? Yes, considering it was the first trip! And I am sure they will be discovering new dive sites as the months go by. Once they have sorted out the tenders then the boat will be fine. The ability to do 3 or 4 atolls in a week is an added bonus, and that you can get to Toau and Apataki, inaccessible from a land based operation, is a sure fire winner. My only word of warning would be that as you can see, sometimes the passes do not deliver. If I had not seen what Apataki could deliver and had had the same experience there as I had in Rangiroa I might have been disappointed. But I think that this sort of diving can be hit & miss. A shame that the coral reefs themselves are not more interesting, as that would have compensated for the fact that on some dives you might not have such good shark & fish encounters.
So, Friday night, back in Papeete. My wife was en route from England and was due to arrive at 0230 on Saturday.
And that brings us to the next enthralling instalment from Ye Journal of the Voyages of Capn Jim in the South Seas, Aharrrrr!
Stay tooned!
Parte The Third: Your Travel To The Other Side Of The World And Bump Into Scott & Robin
Or:
No, We Are Not On Bloody Honeymoon, We Are Here to Get Away From The Kids.
Well after saying goodbye to Rurutu I headed back to Tahiti and a night in the Sheraton. The rest of the team on the Aggressor arrived from LAX that evening and we all went out for a French/Polynesian/Chinese kinda dinner. The thought of spending the week on a boat with 16 Americans gave me great pressure, I mean pleasure! Luckily there was one more European on the boat. Ahhh! She was French!!! Only kidding! Dont take it personally, people - I hate everybody!
So, how come I got to go on the first trip of the Tahiti Aggressor? Cos it's my job, dammit!
(And I paid the prerequisite amount of loot!)The next morning at 0730 we flew to Rangiroa. The joys of 18 people with 500 tons of gear trying to get on a plane that could only fly with 100 tons of luggage. Still, we got there in the end. We then went to a small hotel called the Raira Lagon for breakfast and went to visit a pearl farm. My dear wife said she did not want any pearls, which came as a relief. She wanted diamonds instead. Yeah, right. Before lunch we went to the boat and found our cabins. If you any of you have been on the Fiji Aggressor then you will be familiar with the Tahiti Aggressor, as they are one and the same. Except they now have an extra cabin, so she takes 18. Well, youve gotta make money.
Anyway, shes a 106ft long, 30ft wide cat with 2100hp jet drives on each side. She can do over 20kts, but you would run out of fuel before you left the harbour, so they tend to cruise at 11-12kts. She has 5 cabins down the port side and 4 on the starboard, all on the main deck. Each has a double bed below, single above, in room washbasin and an en suite shower room with dunny. All have large picture windows except the new cabin which has no windows at all, so offers a lovely view of the wall instead.
Upstairs is the galley and saloon. (Point on semantics, here, for the Americans amongst my dear readers. A salon, as you call a saloon, is where ladies have their hair done. A saloon is a sitting/drinking/eating area. As in Last Chance Saloon. After all, John Wayne didnt stroll into the Last Chance Salon and say Get off your hoss, were having a cut & blow dry did he? No.) Anyway, in the saloooooooooon are tables & chairs for eating off (though prefer a plate myself), a couple of sofas, a TV, VCR, music centre etc etc And, vital for a lush like me, a bar that can be sat at inside & out, so if you need a beer and are kitted up ready for a dive you dont have to take it all off to go and get one from inside. Very important. At the back is a shaded area with BBQ & hot tub. Great for making that Nitrogen boil in your blood after a dive! On the very top deck is a huge sun deck with loungers, hammocks, tables, chairs, that sort of thing. Lower deck houses engine rooms.
The dive deck is aft of the cabins, and is huge, wot with this being a cat.
2 huge camera tables, charging facilities, rinse tanks etc and the stupidest idea for going diving in the world.
A dive tender that goes up & down a hydraulic ramp at the back of the boat. This is VERY important if you dont want to get wet, but in a chop the tender is a pig to get back into the docking bay. Quite frankly its bollocks.
The quicker they get 2 RIBs the better, as the tender is aluminium (note correct spelling, Americans!!) and the kind of diving you are doing in the Tuamotus is the right kind to bring the tender down on your bonce with a crash and knock your brains out. Also, with 18 divers, 2 dive guides and 2 boat handlers, there just aint room enough for everyone. And there were, if I recall, at least 14 people with BIG camera rigs. As the old saying goes: Big Camera, Little .
Anyway, all very nice, and I wont bore you with the day to day running of the ship; if you have been on an Aggressor, theyre all much the same. And similar to a Peter Huge operation (I wonder how long itll be before he tries to get a boat in there?!)
So, this was the first trip, and we relied on the expertise of a French guy called Pierre, who had been diving the Tuamotus for 20 odd years, to show us about. Our trip was a day shorter than normal Saturday Friday, so we only had 4½ days diving instead of 5½. For reasons I wont bore you with we had to return to Rangiroa a day early as 2 people had to fly back to Tahiti on business, so we spent Saturday & Sunday at Rangiroa, Monday at Apataki Atoll, Tuesday at Toua and returned to Rangiroa for Wednesday & Thursday.
Basically, the diving is a similar kind of diving at all the atolls in that you are diving walls on the outside, the entrances to passes and doing drift dives through the passes into the lagoons. You just happen to see different things at different passes. Rangiroa is the most famous place for diving in the Tuamotus, but by sheer coincidence, it had the most disappointing diving. We just didnt really hit it right.
There are 2 passes at Rangiroa, Tiputa and Avatoru, about 5 miles apart. You can do 3 or 4 different dives on each pass. We saw numerous grey reef sharks, turtles
mantas (too far away for me to foto) and some saw dolphins (I heard them, but didnt see them) We also saw schools of barracuda, jacks, snapper, bass, that kinda thing. At Avatoru you also see hefty silvertips.
I should say the biggest was perhaps 8ft.
The coral within the channels is pretty dead, but on the reef walls they are healthy, but not very interesting. A limited variety of species and not particularly interesting formations no wonderful swim throughs, gullies etc And no soft corals or fan corals
After our sail to Apataki thats where the fun starts! There is just one pass at Apataki. Tehere. It is about 100 yards wide. You can see from this image
that when the water pushes out from the lagoon into the open ocean the force of the water creates huge waves about 5ft-high. This is due to the amount of water being forced out of the lagoon by the tide. The same thing occurs on an incoming tide; the waves can be created for up to two miles into the lagoon by the force of the water entering through the pass. As you can imagine, a few billion tons of water trying to squeeze through a gap 100m wide has to move pretty darn fast, and this creates some incredible currents. More of that later!
The first dive we did at Apataki was along the reef wall on the southern side of the pass. This was the best bit of reef I saw during the entire 3 weeks I was in Tahiti. It was almost interesting!
However, the fish life was prolific. First up we had a monster school of big eyes, perhaps a couple of thousand swirling about us.
Usually you find these in small caves and overhangs
during the day, but this lot were quite content to swim about in the open; safety in numbers, eh? Just past them we came upon a school of jacks, which of course did the decent thing and swam around in a circle above our heads
We moved closer to the edge of the pass, but the tide was pretty slack, so diving was easy, but viz was down because it was the end of an outgoing tide, so a lot of sand was floating in the water. Here we came across a school of black surgeon fish. I have never seen so many surgeon fish in all my life.
There were tens of thousands of them swirling along the drop-off and on the top of the reef. You could be totally engulfed by them. Awesome.
We then went to the top of the reef and hung around some holes in the top of the reef, where I saw these nice butterfly fish.
The second dive at Apataki was in Tehere pass on an incoming tide; the tide had only been running for about 1 hour, so was not up to full force when we dropped in at the outside of the pass. We scootled along the pass at about 1 kt and slowly picked up speed as we entered a channel perhaps 50ft deep and 20ft wide, sloping gently upwards. We passed small schools of jacks
surgeonfish, some surgeonfish
I was by coincidence at the front when I looked up along the dge of the pass and saw about 20 sharks near the surface, by a small wall. I gestured to everyone else and we then hooked in (dont have a reef hook and want to dive Tehere Pass? Buy one!) and slowly clawed our way up the wall. No easy task in a 2½kt current and holding a camera with an expensive dome port! At the base of the mini wall was a cave, more like a slit in the wall, with an entrance at both ends, The cave was stuffed with grey reef sharks. 30 or 40 at least. Others would swim on from either end and come out the front. The current picked up and when you are as slim as me (Scott will testify to that fact!) you do create quite a barn door effect. The lump of dead coral I was hooked into, perhaps 4ft x 6ft and 3ft high was quite literally lifted off the ground by the me & the current and me & my new found friend started bumping off along the reef. Unfortunately the u/w videographers did not see this, but a few of us had a laugh afterwards! As sort of proof, a couple of quotes from Paul Sloan, director of Tahiti Tourisme in the US: I'd especially like a shot of you dragging a 2-ton coral head down the channel! (PADI Project AWARE is always on the lookout for good eco-poster material...!) and U/W boulder-dragging is truly an untouched niche...! As you can imagine the current was ripping! Most people were looking with intent at the cave, but on looking down into the pass below I was amazed to see hundreds and hundreds of grey reef sharks hurtling along the bottom on the incoming tide. There were %*@#ing squillions of the things! I have never seen some many sharks in all my life. Anyway, air was running out and we flipped over the top of the wall and proceeded to drift over undulating beds of coral into the lagoon shallows to be picked up by the tender.
So, third dive. Well it had to be in the same place. And you thought the current was strong on the previous dive? Pah! It took about 5 minutes to get to the shark cave, whereas before it had taken about 20. We reckoned we were doing 6 kts down the pass. Holy Smoke! And there, ahead of us, was one of these famous Walls of Sharks The entire pass was blocked by hundreds of grey reef sharks, swimming in a lazy circle up one side of the pass across and down the other. This is where Pierres dive briefing did not go quite to plan. With a 6kt current you aint got much time to think, so we hooked in and attempt admire the view. However we were hooked in up current, so the only way we could see them was to turn our heads. This did one of three things. 1) It ripped your mask off your head. 2) It filled your reg up with water. 3) It ripped your mask off your head and filled your reg up with water. It therefore made looking at them very difficult and taking photos of them next to impossible. You couldnt turn around enough and anyway the current was running so fast your strobe arms just bent all over the shop. Still, I managed to croon my neck round and look at them without drowning! Some were breaking formation and swimming towards us, getting to within a couple of inches of my fins at least before darting off. It was impossible to take pictures, and I tried gesturing at Pierre that we should unhook, pile through the sharks and hook on down current of them. Then maybe we could get a picture or two of them, and perhaps fire of a couple of shots as we charged through the middle of them. Anyway, I couldnt get his attention, and it all went pear-shaped. We just sat there and did nothing! In the end I unhooked and was flipped by the current over the top of the pass and along the coral on the sides. There was no way I could get back and no way to hook on as the hook just ripped the coral out of the reef. I just hope that they have no resolved the way these dives are done. Because the way we did it was not the way to do it!
I got no decent pictures at all - the conditions were almost impossible, with the current bending strobe arms all over the shop, masks & regs filling with water, trying to secure a firm hold, etc etc. But believe me, it happened! Anyway, that was the third dive at Apataki.
That night we sailed to Toau Atoll. We moored to the south of Utogi pass, and beyond a small motu could be seen Fakatahuna Pass. Pierre called it Fakatahuna Diabolique because he said it was just fantastic.
The first dive we did was along the edge of the reef at Utogi and then into the pass. The usual stuff, with lots of schooling fish,
grey reefies, some mantas (too far away to photograph) and the such. The pass was very interesting. A series of parallel channels running into the pass, scoured almost clean of any living coral. Every so often you would pass over a large bowl that had been hollowed out of the reef substrate. The second dive was at Fakatahuna, at the mouth of the pass. We saw 1 grey reef shark at a cleaning station and that was about it. The second dive we went into the channel and did a very interesting drift dive over perhaps the most interesting corals that I saw all trip lots of boomies sprouting from a sandy bottom covered in fish. We saw no sharks! Pierre said that the reason there were no sharks about was because there was probably a shark-eating shark out there tiger or great hammerhead enjoying chow time. Anyway, these 3 dives were nowhere near as good as those at Apataki, but then few would be.
That night we sailed back to Rangiroa. We should have been going to Fakarava but didnt because we had to get 2 people back to the airport to fly back to Tahiti. So the last day was spent at Avatoru and Tiputa passes. See above for details on them!!!
On the final night of the trip (Thursday night) we went to the Kia Ora Hotel for dinner and all got slammed. The rest of the contingency returned to Papeete the next morning but I hung about in Rangiroa for the day and flew back in the afternoon. We all had dinner together at the Sheraton and the rest of them flew off to LA that night.
To sum up, was the Aggressor good? Yes, considering it was the first trip! And I am sure they will be discovering new dive sites as the months go by. Once they have sorted out the tenders then the boat will be fine. The ability to do 3 or 4 atolls in a week is an added bonus, and that you can get to Toau and Apataki, inaccessible from a land based operation, is a sure fire winner. My only word of warning would be that as you can see, sometimes the passes do not deliver. If I had not seen what Apataki could deliver and had had the same experience there as I had in Rangiroa I might have been disappointed. But I think that this sort of diving can be hit & miss. A shame that the coral reefs themselves are not more interesting, as that would have compensated for the fact that on some dives you might not have such good shark & fish encounters.
So, Friday night, back in Papeete. My wife was en route from England and was due to arrive at 0230 on Saturday.
And that brings us to the next enthralling instalment from Ye Journal of the Voyages of Capn Jim in the South Seas, Aharrrrr!
Stay tooned!
Parte The Third: Your Travel To The Other Side Of The World And Bump Into Scott & Robin
Or:
No, We Are Not On Bloody Honeymoon, We Are Here to Get Away From The Kids.
