Tahiti… down under

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/02/2005 (7616 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TO most people, Tahiti is waving coconut palms, fragrant flowers, exotic fruit and, above all, romance.

To a scuba diver, Tahiti means one thing: sharks. But there’s so much more to diving here — like flying the passes, swimming with wild dolphins and a few other surprises.

Pass flying is drift diving times 10. You do this in waters ringed by atolls, which are the rims of old volcanoes that stick up out of the water like the edge of a bowl. There are cracks in the rim… the passes. And when the tide forces water in or out of the bowl, you get one hellacious current. Up to seven knots. Fast enough to rip your mask off.

We were in the Tuamotu Archipelago, an hour by air northeast of Papeete, at the king of all pass dives — Apataki Atoll. The channel here is narrow and V-shaped. We dropped down from the Tahiti Aggressor dive skiff, getting to the bottom at 15 metres as fast as we could. The current grabbed us immediately and we were off, cruising low over the coral heads to a point halfway down the pass where Aggressor Capt. Randy Wright had crammed fish heads into a hole.

The deal is, you attach yourself to a chunk of rock with a reef hook (a metal claw on a metre-long nylon line) and watch the fun. Randy had barely cleared the hole when a pack of grey reef sharks showed up, tumbling head over tail in their effort to get the fish. Then they straightened out, flowing up the pass against the current.

It was a river of sharks… hundreds of them as far as the eye could see. And then, suddenly, they were gone. We let out our lines, leaving us tethered to the rock by only the rope, held out our arms like Superman and flew. Mostly it was a steady blast in the face, but every so often the current would gust and we would flutter on the ends of our line like leaves in the wind.

And then the sharks came back, a silver river flowing down the channel. We stayed there 25 minutes while the sharks came and went half a dozen times, sometimes being blown within metres of us.

The Aggressor Fleet put a live-aboard dive boat in Tahiti two years ago and from the first, the draw was the sharks. What makes this different from other shark locations, such as Cocos, is the chance to fly a pass while surrounded by sharks.

Shark-feed dives

Then there are the shark-feed dives. We were at Rangiroa Atoll at the aptly named Shark Rodeo site. The sharks knew we were coming. The minute Randy got there with his tuna head and bag of chum, he was surrounded. A dozen grey reef sharks circled, getting closer with every turn until they were within touching distance.

A shark would swoop in, pull up maybe two metres from us, hesitate just long enough for a photo and then swim away. This went on for our entire dive and on our way back to the skiff, a silky (larger, more streamlined and quite rare this close in) showed up. He circled and actually bumped Randy. The shark got so close to me, I could see mottling on his belly and two tiny yellow-and-black pilot fish practically pasted to his nose.

Making four dives a day, there wasn’t much time for anything else. That’s the beauty of a live-aboard boat for diehard divers. No outside distractions, no shore trips, no shopping. Virtually everyone on board had scheduled a few extra days in Moorea or Bora Bora to do all of that.

But diving in Tahiti isn’t all sharks. Half a dozen dolphins showed up one day. We were on our way to a reef at Rangiroa when two divers started pointing and waving. The dolphins emerged slowly from the deep blue. They eventually got close enough for us to see shades of silver skin and scars. Their echo-locating squeaks vibrated in our heads.

They swam in formation, two or three together, looping and twirling as the photographers in our group tried to follow. The divers’ exhaled air rose in champagne-bubble sheets and the dolphins, apparently quite amused by this, cut in and out of the curtain in a surreal ballet.

“The crazier you act, the closer they’ll get,” Randy said.

This is not novice diving. You are in fast currents, bouncing with the dolphins — up to five metres one minute, down to 20 metres the next. You need to be able to control your ascents and descents and you have to be comfortable doing a five-metre safety stop in blue water with nothing to hold onto and two-metre-high waves crashing over your head.

However, there are more relaxing dives. At Atapaki, the Fish Holes site was a garden of hard coral and fish — platinum African pompano, lionfish, butterfly fish and angels, puffins, a million tiny chromis and, for the lucky guys who found them, mating octopi.

Then there were the mantas. We had just finished Tiputa Pass at Rangiroa. We came up in calm water and were waiting for our pickup when someone spotted them.

Everyone scrambled aboard the skiff and we raced over to this frenzy of flapping in the water. It was incredible below — a solid carpet of fusiliers (popular food fish in these parts) swam frantically back and forth, in the middle of their monthly spawning.

All of us went to Tahiti looking for sharks. We found far more.

— CanWest News Service

Visiting Polynesia

Getting there

French Polynesia, in the same time zone as Hawaii but south of the Equator, is actually five island groups spread over more than two million square miles. Papeete is where you find the island of Tahiti. And the Tuamotus are an hour by air northeast of that. The flight into Papeete is eight hours from Los Angeles.

The Tahiti Aggressor

* This 32-metre, 18-passenger catamaran does one-week charters between Rangiroa and Fakarava. The boat is decked out with plenty of amenities such as individual room air conditioning, lots of storage space, a full range of dive and photo rental gear, VCR, DVD player and e-mail service (at $5 a pop) to contact home. There are also special dry tables for camera gear and E6 film processing.

* This is not novice diving. You need to be comfortable in currents, have control of your buoyancy and be able to do a blue water safety stop.

* Aggressor trips run $2,895 US. This covers the week of diving, tanks and air, but not transportation to Tahiti and in Tahiti.

More information

* Aggressor Fleet Ltd., P.O. Box 1470, Morgan City, LA, 70381, toll free (800) 348-2628, website www.aggressor.com

* General information, Tahiti Tourism,

www.tahiti-tourism.com