Blue Book of Boats

On the second day at Bora Bora I took things easy in the morning. In the early afternoon Phil and I went ashore to find a Lagoon tour. There was one on offer at the dock, but they needed at least 4 people to go and Phil and I were the only ones. Phil then went around the docks trying to convince two more people to come. I went to talk to the boat captains and found one about to leave. $75 for 3 hours so I grabbed Phil and we hopped aboard. This was about a 25′ aluminum boat with a glass panel in the bottom, and a single 115 HP outboard.

Phil and I were the only ones from the Amsterdam on board, the other passengers 3 French couples and a pair of honeymooners from California, American-Chinese. All the men and half the women were kind of out of shape, a bit chubby and soft, in contrast with the Tahitian crew who were muscular, tattooed and hard as rock.

We were provided with masks and snorkels. There were flippers too but none big enough for my feet!   We stopped 3 different places. The first, just outside the reef, was populated with trigger fish and black-tipped sharks. we also spotted a few lemon sharks, bigger but further away, they never came close.

At the second location we were surrounded by Rays. The crew seemed to know them and after observing them awhile I could see that each one was different. One had a damaged, stumpy tail, another an exceptionally long sharp tail. I began to recognize them as they swam by. I took quite a few photos in both locations. Phil has a fancy SLR camera, but didn’t bring it so I will have to give him some of my photos. If you touched one on the nose he would rise to the surface right in your face, expecting to be fed. I couldn’t help feelin that we were in a sort of Marine Petting zoo!

The third location was inside the reef, with lots of coral and many kinds of colorful reef fish. By then my battery was dead so I left the camera on board and just enjoyed swimming around.

On the way back we stopped at the Hilton resort to let off the most glamorous of the French couples. This place is $1000 a night and up, and they were pretty young so maybe they were rich and famous, but we didn’t recognize them.

Back at the ship I showered with everything on including camera and sandals to get all the salt off.  Here’s another photo of a Bora Bora sunset.

In the evening the concert was a Beatles group which joined the ship at Papeete. This was their first show on board. They dressed as “early Beatles” with neat suits and ties and bobbed hair. They really are form Liverpool so have the correct accent. Looks not so much, although they did call each other John, Paul, George and Ringo, or we wouldn’t have known which was which. Who knew my mother was a Beatles fan? She was screaming with the best of them.

The sound was pretty good on the first few tunes, like “All my loving” and “I want to hold your hand”. If you closed your eyes you could believe it really was the Beatles. Later on they began to slip bit and sound like a cover band. Still not bad. All older tunes, the most recent being “Hey Jude”. They tried to get the audience to sing along on a few songs, without great success.