2/9 Claire – Aitutaki Scuba

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Originally uploaded by blenkers

OK yes, it was a very different story. They are quite laid back about the diving rules you learn in your PADI course. Onu, which means Turtle, owns the Aitutaki dive centre and he came out to introduce himself and chatted for a while about where we were going. Basically to see the turtles, maybe about 20-25metres (erm we are qualified to 18m and he knows this) and he seems VERY vague about some of the other stuff. Now if I wasn’t so new to all this I’d be less worried but I have to come to terms with the fact that he does this all the time, he says we can stop at a depth we are comfortable with, and he has a good reputation.

So after a little panic at the surface, Onu comes over to me… tells to keep calm, pop in my regulator and he takes my hand in his massive shovel of a hand and tells me he’s going to take me to see the turtle… and down we go…

I have NEVER seen, or imagined I would see, a turtle this big. It was happily sitting on the coral, about a metre from head to tail. Onu gets close, balances himself on a bit of coral close to the turtle and starts giving him a pat. The he starts cleaning off his shell of algae and scrub. I also had a go but after a couple of gentle shell pats I had to back off, my balance isn’t as good and it’s one thing turtle tickling but unexpected turtle mounting is not at all OK.

Within a few mins of this Onu signals for me to follow him again. He points down toward something that another couple of divers that were on our trip were photographing, under a coral shelf was a baby reef shark about three quarters of a metre long. Fortunately we didn’t see the bigger one at the back of the same area that was apparently three times that size! Not sure I might not have wasted a little air from my tank if I had seen that.

Next up, there is so much wildlife on show during this dive Ian thinks they are all on a retainer, is a ray. I can see what I think is 3 graceful rays gliding past in the distance, no there were four. By the time I had tried to get Ian’s attention to point them out there were 5. I was expecting that they’d sense us and do a runner (or a swimmer?) quickly but they didn’t. They stayed around that area for the rest of our dive and we were close enough to see them clearly.

At this point I’m trying to remember if these any of these things are at all dangerous but they aren’t. That’s not something that can be said of a Moray Eel, a giant Moray Eel at that. I have seen an Eel in Raratonga with a head about as big as my hand. This one, a head as big as a football. You can go and have a look at a safe distance, they don’t come out of their holes during the day unless you provoke them or get too close. Needless to say I was about 15ft away. Onu however got a little too close for my liking (hey he does this sort of thing every day so he knows what he’s doing). In our next dive there was a larger Moray Eel down in the depths of a dark cavern toward the bed of the sea, he was trying to get us to go down and see it but not on your life, one of them things could have had me arm off.

Finally we saw a bright blue fish, the type you might expect to see illustrated by computer graphics in Finding Nemo, but this fella was about 4ft high by 6ft long.

Then of course there were the hundreds of other small brightly coloured Nemo style fish but it’s a great dive when these suddenly don’t become priority viewing! I wish we’d had an underwater camera for this day but this wasn’t available. You will have to take my word for it.