Awe and Wonder

I’ve recently learned from a dear friend who has been doing a deep-dive into the concepts of awe and wonder that awe can be defined as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world” (from UC Berkeley professor Dachner Kelter who studies awe and wonder for a living, a dreamy career!). We have had our fair share of awe-inspiring and wondrous moments daily in this oceanic world.

In our two months in the Tuamotu atolls of French Polynesia, we reveled in the magic of the abundant sea life and I’d love to share some of our favorite creatures and experiences with you.

In Fakarava, we got to hang out on four separate days with a common reef octopus while snorkeling. The octopus would hide when we first anchored our dinghy to swim there, and then poke its head out in curiosity to watch us. We also got to see it hunting and using its arms to search through the crevices of the coral for food, while two spotted grouper stayed at attention nearby for scraps. The octopus changes colors and also textures to blend in with the coral instantaneously. I am proud to be an octopus ogler!

We had so many awesome encounters with sharks of several kinds — and honestly, no, we were not scared by the sharks but were instead full of respect. American culture has gone overboard with how “scary” sharks are when in reality most species of sharks, especially inside atolls, are entirely uninterested by humans. In the daytime, the fish and the sharks don’t even interact and the sharks swim right by without any of the fish flinching or changing behavior — the fish are far more affected by human presence than by reef sharks!

We saw blacktip reef sharks frequently — and our favorite was seeing their fins stick out of the water in the shallows at sunset (say sunset shallow sharks five times fast). And we saw our first whitetip reef shark in Makemo Central anchorage where we accidentally woke it up by swimming close to its cave where it was resting.

We also swam alongside hundreds of grey reef sharks while diving what is known as the Wall of Sharks in Fakarava South Pass — imagine a school of thousands of shah shah fish with grey sharks lazily swimming by. We also got to hang out with a Napoleon/Maori wrasse as we did our safety stop at the end of a dive.

Trumpetfish hang out in the shallows and in the deeper water and use their long snouts as an arrow of sorts to jab at prey in the water.

In each atoll, we had anywhere from five to thirteen remora living under our boat. Remora are a fish with “suction gills” on the top who help clean sharks, mantas, and fish. Conveniently for us, they also helped clean our boat bottom from any algae growing on it. In return, we’d cut up our veggie scraps really small and feed them to the remora each day. Sometimes some fish with yellow fins would join in the feeding too!

Other incredible creatures included the 8-foot wingspan manta ray that swam slowly by us at arm’s length with its huge mouth coming seemingly straight at us and who curiously side-eyed us with its left eye that is impossibly far from its right eye; a juvenile yellow boxfish that is one of the most hilariously colored fish around (for a great read on boxfish and good photos see this NYT article How the World’s Squarest Fish Gets Around); regal angelfish with their purple, blue and orange stripes that somehow remind me of world’s most colorful sports uniform; floating with dozens of unicornfish soaking up sunshine and feeding on invisible-to-us plankton; and the buzzy call of grey-backed terns as they dove for their breakfast fish next to our boat.

These atolls were not easy to navigate — they are full of “bommies”, which is cruiser-speak for coral heads that can eat your boat if you accidentally run into them, sailing on a schedule to appropriately time entering and exiting the passes so you don’t get caught in roiling water and currents that could put your boat sideways onto a reef, minimum protection from the nearly constant 20+ knot winds that blow from many different directions, and the limited fresh food and supplies. However, the awe and wonder that these unspoiled reefs revealed was worth the challenges and so were the dear friends we made in these remote places over bonfires and snorkels.

We are excited to spend some extended time in Tahiti and Moorea with their abundance of fully-stocked supermarkets, restaurants, hikes, bus systems, and all the “stuff and things” we have not had for the past three months! And we are dreaming of a potential return to the Tuamotus once the infamously strong maramu winds of July and August are finished.