Tales of Old Samoa - The Diver and the Shark

    My only venture into free-diving 60 feet deep was when we were living on the island of Aunu'u, in American Samoa One weekend the Pago Pago Dive Club chartered a small boat to bring them out to "my" island. They tied up to the Aunu'u mooring buoy just offshore.
     I brought my mask, fins, and snorkel down to the beach to join them. Most of the club members had SCUBA gear, and soon they were splashing by ones and twos over the side of the motor launch "FiaFia". Within minutes several divers surfaced with remarks that they'd spotted black coral about 60 feet down off the edge of the reef.
     From the surface I could spot far below the black smudge that they were talking about. I was determined to get some for myself.  I floated quietly, face down, breathing through my snorkel and hyperventilating for almost a minute. Putting my head down, I kicked for the bottom. I could feel the pressure compressing my chest and lungs. The negative buoyancy slightly accelerated my descent as I glided down.
     I planted my feet on the sandy bottom, 60 feet from the surface, grasped the black coral firmly, and pulled hard. It wiggled a bit.
     I twisted it, hoping to separate it from its base. It yielded only slightly.
     I was beginning to feel the carbon dioxide building in my bloodstream, urging me to breath.  Releasing my grip, I headed leisurely toward the surface.
     Floating face down on the gentle waves, breathing again through my snorkel, I could heard admiring remarks from those with SCUBA gear, pointing out to others, "Hey! Did you see Hastings diving? He went all the way to the bottom out here!"
    After a few minutes of recovery, I drew extra deep breaths again, getting ready to head down. I was determined to surface with that piece of black coral. Kicking hard, I raced straight down. I leveled out two feet from the bottom, and found myself staring head on at the face of a large shark not more than three feet away!

    All thoughts of black coral vanished as I planted a foot on the bottom, pushed hard, and took off toward the distant surface as fast as my fins could propel me. I shot halfway out of the water like a Polaris missile, spitting out my mouthpiece and yelling "SHARK"!!!!!!
     To my amazement and consternation, as I took a deep breath I realized that my friends, my fellow divers, were all laughing! I was miffed!
     "There's a large shark down there!" I repeated, thinking that perhaps they hadn't heard my warning.
     "We watched the whole thing!", someone replied.
     "We saw the shark at just about the same moment that you headed for the bottom. There was no way we could warn you! You were heading straight down, and the shark was swimming along the bottom. It looked like you were going to collide with each other.
      You leveled out and stopped suddenly. The shark saw you and stopped just as abruptly. You both froze, staring at each other for about two seconds, and then you both flipped around and shot off in opposite directions!
     If we could have heard shark-frequencies and understood shark-talk, that big fellow was probably screaming "PALAGI!!! I'm being chased by a palagi!!!"

A Morning Run

     With the end of Daylight Savings Time it should be easier to get out of bed, since it gets light an hour earlier. However, the temperature has dropped overnight into the mid 30's so it's hard to convince myself that it is a good idea to put on running clothes, pull a ski cap over my ears, slip on gloves, and go for a morning run.
     Once I was actually up and out the door, I went for a slow-paced 5 miler along Riverside Drive, across the Huguenot Bridge over the James River and back again.

     The air was cooler than the water, and sinuous tendrils of morning mist did slow gyrations just above the still river, their movements mirrored on the smooth water.

  A couple of mallards came whirring down, back-flapping their wings to slow down just before extending their webbed toes to water-ski the last couple of feet before settling contentedly, gabbling to each other as they paddled off in search of submerged breakfast.

      The still surface of the river in the morning sun was a pallet of color, reflecting sky blue and brilliant shades of orange and red and green from the trees on the far bank. At the edge of the low Bosher's Dam the plunging water sparkled like cascading diamonds in the sunlight.


     I'll try to hold those images the next morning when I'm considering pulling the covers up around my neck and going back to sleep!

Another tale of old Samoa - Pago Pago i le Po - Pago Pago Harbor at Night

Tropical Night Magic

      The perfume of night-blooming jasmine slipped through the corroded copper wire window screens of the house by the bay. Its sweet aroma almost masked the combined stink of sour mud and fish oil wafting across from the cannery less than half a mile away across the water.
      Perched several feet in the air on sturdy posts, the house had a rocky front yard just six feet wide, ending suddenly at a stone wall that dropped a few feet to the waters of the harbor at Pago Pago. The kitchen window faced away from the bay, only inches from the paved road that skirted the deep, L-shaped harbor.

      Directly across the road stood an old two story building known in the 1960's as the Max Haleck General Store. Many years earlier it had been the Haleck Hotel. Somerset Maugham had tarried there for several days, watching torrents of water sheeting down from low-hanging clouds, inspiring him to write a tropical tale of Sadie Thompson and rain.
The night was warm and humid. Unlike the stifling hot summer nights of a big city, soft tropical breezes flowed into the harbor from the southeast tradewinds of the open ocean, gently caressing moist skin.
      Lights from across the across the bay bounced shimmering reflections through the open front of the house, dancing across the ceiling of the darkened living room. Just outside the door on the side of the house, standing in the small grassy yard, I could watch a slow-moving light soaring away from the low hill on the side of the bay, gaining altitude as it hummed along a thick steel cable. The small hanging gondola swayed slightly from side to side as it began the steep caternary swoop toward the towering black wall of Mount Alava and its red-winking transmitter tower. From that high point TV programs beamed out across the island of Tutuila and over the 75 miles of open ocean to the islands of Ofu, Olosega, and Ta'u, a day's journey by boat toward the east.

      Retrieving a long, pointed Samoan paddle from under the low steps where I had stashed it, I stepped barefoot across the rocks. Reaching under the house, I grabbed the curved bow of my paopao, a fourteen foot long outrigger canoe. I lowered myself over the edge of the stone wall into the shallow water of the bay, moving cautiously in my flip-flops so that I wouldn't cut my feet on the jagged oyster shells that covered the bottom. A quick tug, and the narrow wooden canoe slapped down onto the water.
      Hewn from a single log, the paopao hull was perhaps a foot and a half deep, but too narrow to sit inside. A short board set atop the gunwales served as a seat. I dipped the paddle into the water, and found the shallow bottom just a few inches below. A couple of shoves with the tip of the paddle sent the canoe gliding out across the coral shoal and into deeper water.

      I paddled along the waterfront past the boat shed and the main dock where freighters unloaded goods and occasional cruise liners disgorged hoards of silver-haired tourists intent on bargaining for carved wood souvenirs and shell leis in the few hours ashore before heading off again toward some other south seas port. The lights from the government housing along Centipede Row cast sparkling paths across the black water. Passing the oil dock, I could smell a pungent mixture of diesel oil mingled with the sweet smell of the blossoms of the pua trees that grew on the grounds of the Rainmaker Hotel.

      Looking south, away from the lights of Fagatogo on this moonless night, I could see the black silhouette of Rainmaker Mountain against a brilliant background of thousands of stars and the faint double smudge of the Magellanic Clouds. The five stars of the Southern Cross pointed toward the mouth of the harbor and the ocean beyond.
As I turned again, I could feel the long ocean swells raising, then lowering me, gently urging me back the way I had come. I glided along the eastern side of the bay, skimming the surface of the smooth ink-black waters.

      The tip of the outrigger began to glow with a faint eery blue-green light. It pulsed each time the paopao surged forward, suddenly leaping around the paddle with each stroke. Now it brightened, sparkling like thousands of bright watery stars, swirling galaxies of light suddenly flashing into being and fading away in the glowing wake.
The phosphorescence stayed with me for most of the return trip, escorting me back to my starting point, leaving me with a lingering sense of connection with the whole Universe.

Adventures In Belize - Day Ten

     The rain came and went several times during the night, rattling close overhead loudly enough to wake me. I went out on deck as the warm, damp air was beginning to get light. I could hear the calls of birds in the dense vegetation near the marina, accompanied by a frog chorus. Water dripped from the edges of the Bimini top overhead. It dribbled over the edges of the boat onto the surface of the slip. It splashed in the undergrowth, and water vapor twisted in lazy tendrils from the coral sand and gravel up into the still morning air.

     Off in the distance I could hear the faintest whisper of sound in the back ground. It gradually got louder. Looking in that direction I could see a low hanging dark grey cloud moving slowly in my direction. Beneath the cloud was a veil of dark streamers reaching to the ground, dumping a tropical downpour on the jungle as it swept along. The millions upon millions of large raindrops splattering on leaves, splashing into puddles marked its coming with a whispering roar that got louder and louder as it got closer. 

      Billions of raindrops, rushing toward the ground, pushing the air ahead of them, created a warm humid wind blowing out in all directions, carrying the scent of sweet blossoms and decaying vegetation. So dense that the cascading rain obscured the landscape behind it, the storm swept across the marina with an enveloping roar of falling water that lasted only a few minutes and was gone.

     Soon the sun appeared from behind the tattered clouds, just in time to heat the already steamy air as we packed up and lugged dufflebags to the marina office for checkout and to await the arrival of the van to the tiny Placencia Airport.

     We’ve been here a week or so. Now it’s finally time to go; I can’t believe how quickly time has flown. Packing up the bathing suits…that’s a sign we must be going home. When we get back home, and they ask us what we miss most, we’ll shrug our shoulders and we’ll smile…

 

If you would like to see a twenty-five minute video of 

these ten days of adventure,click on the hotlink below.

Adventures In Belize

Adventures In Belize - Day Nine

Friday, October 19, 2012

      The wind was blowing out of the northeast when we went to bed. I was a bit worried that it would shift during the night as it had other nights. If that happened, there was not enough room on the other side of the spot where we had dropped anchor, and we would drift into the mangrove roots. It didn't happen.

   Instead, the wind died completely and the night was hot and sticky. To add to the discomfort the still air next to the mangrove swamp on Lark Cay was populated by those tiny little gnats that people call "no-see-'ems". Small enough to squeeze through a regular window screen, they have a hearty appetite, and sleep was frequently interrupted with sharp little pinprick bites. 

   The lagoon where we were anchored behind Lark Cay was mirror-still in the early morning twilight, reflecting tall dark cumulus clouds with bright edges, back lit by the rising sun.

The others on board were still too sleepy to go adventuring, so I took the inflatable dinghy by myself to explore the shoreline. Actually there was very little shore visible. 

     Dense mangrove thickets crowded right down the edge of the lagoon, creating an impenetrable barricade of aerial roots all the way out into water. They plunge down a foot, two feet into the muddy or sandy bottom, holding the land in place against all but the fiercest of hurricane-driven wind and waves, and create a labyrinthine refuge and nursery for all sorts of sea life.

      Beyond the reach of the roots, colonies of coral grow in the clear, sunlit water. Seemingly infinite in variety, composed of uncountable billions of tiny sea-creatures living in symbiosis. These polyps eat microscopic plankton and floating organic debris, but also are nourished by the photosynthesis of specialized cells of plant algae that live inside the coral's tissue. Each individual coral polyp is capable of sharing the nutrition with all of the members of the colony. Their supporting calcium carbonate skeletal material, accumulated over countless generations builds the massive coral reefs of Belize.

    As I skimmed along the surface I was fascinated by the constantly changing contours of the bottom beneath the Zodiac. One moment the water would be that infinite deep cobalt blue of the tropic ocean. As I sped over different depths the color would change to a lighter, shadowy blue, then emerald, then apple-green, dependent on how close the coral heads were to the underside of the dinghy. By the time I got back to the "Lovely Cruise" the rest of the crew was almost ready to haul up the anchor.

    There is a long coral and sand bank that stretches a long distance out from the shore of Lark Cay, and we were not eager to repeat the previous day's tense moments of crossing that shallow water. 

   John set a course south toward Bugle Cay, and I stationed myself on the forward deck to watch for shoaling water. As soon as we were certain that there was deep water to starboard John set a new course directly toward the town of Placencia. We dropped anchor in twenty feet of water a hundred yards or so off the town waterfront, joining several other cruising sailboats already there.

    A shouted conversation with the captain of the closest boat indicated that the new town dock was still under construction, and that we should tie up to that rickety-looking low wooden dock that stretched out a couple of hundred feet from the beach. 

  As we motored in on the dinghy we could see that the outermost section of the dock consisted of nothing more than pilings, the decking having been carried away in some storm. We tied up the dinghy midway on the dock, walked cautiously toward land, stepping over loose planks and missing pieces.

     A long panga fishing boat with a high, rounded bow rested on the beach, and people sitting in the shade just beyond the sand enjoyed the gentle late morning breezes. We were enticed by the delicious odors of cooking food coming from a vendor's hut at the edge of the beach, and stopped to talk with the owner for a few minutes, promising that we would come back to try some of her edible wares after we explored the town a bit.

    Placencia is spread out for several miles along a very thin spit of sandy land with the ocean on one side and a vast salt water lagoon on the other..There is one dirt road that winds from the waterfront up the peninsula toward connections with the other largely unpaved roads that pass for highways in Belize. We strolled past a Shell gas station, and were a bit puzzled that there were no cars getting gas until we read the hand lettered sign taped to the front of the pump!

     The Guiness Book of World Records lists Placencia's Main Street as the world's narrowest main street. It is really nothing more than a cement sidewalk that reaches for over a mile through the long skinny center of the town, raised a few inches above the loose sand. We walked along it for a bit.

    Scattered along the main street are small shops selling clothing, shops selling touristy souvenirs, guest houses and bed-and-breakfast establishments, beach cabanas, an elementary school, brightly painted houses with metal roofs and gutters to catch rainwater in cisterns, well-kept gardens, and sandy vacant lots. No place in town is more than a few blocks from the water. We walked out toward the ocean side and found a beautiful narrow beach where the three-inch-high waves broke in small ripples against golden yellow sand. 

   On a side "street" we found a charming little open air bar, and stopped for some lunch. The couple who own the Pickled Parrot were recent arrivals fro New Jersey. He had been a truck driver, and when his wife retired from a teaching job and suggested that they move to Belize, he eagerly had embraced the idea. He runs the bar and she does the cooking in the kitchen of the adjacent house wherwe they live. They have been in Placencia less than a year, and are loving it. We stopped by the beachside food vendor's spot to buy some home made candy on the way back to the boat.

    By late afternoon we had navigated the thirteen waypoints on the GPS that marked the shallow channel back to the Sunsail Marina. Two marina workers came out to meet us as we approached, pulling alongside to let the pilot come aboard to steer the big catamaran back into the tight quarters between the boat slips. 

     With a practiced flourish, one hand advancing the port engine and the other hand reversing the starboard engine, he pivoted that clumsy square boat with ease, sliding it backwards smoothly in between the pilings into the slip. Someone else tossed the mooring lines. They were cleated in place, and with that final nautical action our voyage was over.

    It did feel wonderful to take a long, hot shower, to put on clean clothes, and to walk with the others down the road to Robert's Grove for a delicious dinner on the deck overlooking the water, but I was already feeling nostalgic for the time we had spent on this Lovely Cruise.

Adventures In Belize - Day Eight

Thursday, October 18, 2012 - Day Eight

This morning the sun rose directly behind Laughing Bird Cay, silhouetting the coconut palms, the figure of a ranger raking the sand, and the thatched palapa. 

     A deep orange sun peeped through the palm fronds, turning the still water near the beach a rippling gold and laying a shimmering colorful path out across the water toward the boat. A flock of gray and pick parrots flapped past, close to the surface of the ocean. A manatee raised its large round head above the surface for a look around and vanished again beneath the surface.

    I thought I saw someone swimming over the reef in the distance, but realized that there was no snorkel sticking up. I had seen an old water soaked log gently bobbing in the swells, appearing and disappearing as if someone were diving.....I guessed. 

I watched the dark spot for at least 15 minutes before seeing an oar-shaped fin lift out of the water and go under again, revealing that I had been watching a sea turtle foraging for its breakfast in the shallow waters over the reef.
    I also observed a tiny finch flutter past and dip into the water a hundred yards away between the boat and shore. It beat its wings with a brief flurry of motion, propelling itself several feet closer to shore, but not breaking free of the water. It rested perhaps fifteen seconds and repeated its fluttering lurch ahead. I expected at any moment that some large fish would suddenly appear and gobble the struggling bird, but it kept on fluttering, resting fluttering, and resting, each time a shorter distance and with obviously fading strength. At last it fluttered no more. All motion stopped, and the small lifeless body floated off slowly on the current.

    An after-breakfast swim was agreeable to everyone, so off in the dinghy again. As we were pulling away a dive-charter launch out of Placencia came roaring into the beach, and a dozen eager visitors clambered ashore. 
 
     John immediately changed course and headed away from the spot where we had planned to land, in favor of a more isolated bit of shore near the end of the island.

    John, Sheila, and Mary Ann headed for the edge of the reef with their gear, and Jane, Ruth and I opted to swim parallel to the shore down toward the beach where the dive boat had landed. We swam along very slowly mostly over white coral sand, and saw lots of smaller colorful fish and scattered small corals.
    Approaching landing beach I saw a dark cloud of something in the shallows. As I got closer the cloud resolved itself into millions two inch long dark little fish, swimming and darting as one amorphous mass, constantly changing shape and direction first one way and then the opposite, then swirling briefly into a tight vortex before become amoeba-like once again. 

     By the time we came ashore the rest of our party was resting in the shade of the palapa, and eager to start back to the boat. They waited patiently for another twenty minutes while I splashed contentedly in the shallows along the four foot wide beach to the end of the cay and back, taking pictures along the way.

    It was almost lunchtime, but we saw that our next anchorage at South Long Coca Cays was only about an hour's motoring time, and decided to have lunch once we got there. I was at the helm, and several times posted lookouts in the bow to warn of shallow water. We skirted several reefs, swinging wide around the privately owned Mosquito Cay. As we approached the mooring ball at our destination we saw thirty and forty-foot mounds of coral sand and rock piled in huge heaps in several spots on the cay, and a large area that had been excavated and smoothed and leveled to create an artificial harbor. 

      We were told that a large Japanese firm was able to get around the strict environmental laws of Belize (rumor has it that there was a lot of paying off of the right people), and were in the process of building a large resort. In the meantime the whole place is an atrocious eyesore. Large plumes of coral silt drift in the water down the current, totally clouding any view in the water. We opted to cast off from the mooring ball and head for Lark Key instead.
    I set a course almost due west toward Logger Cay, passing between it and the northernmost of the Lark Cays.  Instead of trying to thread our way through this challenging and potentially dangerous area, I took us north of the main Lark Cay, and turning southwest skirted along a very long bank of sand and coral, heading toward Bugle Cays. 

     On reaching the recommended distance to the south and west, and giving it a bit more, I turned due south to cross the bank, and watched with increasing apprehension as the depth gauge went from sixty to forty to twenty to ten in rapid succession. Going forward at a snail's pace, my hand on the throttle in case of a sudden need to rev the engines full astern, the depth reading progressed to eight, then five, then three, then one-point-eight before starting to drop to deeper depths, and I began to breathe again.

    We ran up to the north east again, paralleling a line of small mangrove-covered cays. Reaching the spot indicated as an anchorage on the charts, the depth forty feet from the edge of the mangroves still read fifty-five feet. With John in the bow giving directions, we edged very slowly into a sheltered lagoon, decided that it was too narrow for good anchorage, and backed out again. John dropped the anchor on the muddy bottom as close to shore as we dared, and let out a hundred feet of anchor chain, finally coming to a stop in the deep water again. 

     We will be fine this evening unless the wind changes. In that case the first thing that wakes us may be the scraping of mangrove branches against the side of the boat.

Adventures In Belize - Day Seven

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

            I missed sunrise this morning. The night was very still, and virtually no breeze came through the open ports and hatch. The small fan was on, but provided little comfort from the heat and humidity, and it was hard to sleep. It cooled some before dawn, and I slept soundly until the sunlight shining through the port hole and the rippling reflections of sunlight on the water shining on the ceiling woke me.

       After breakfast John, Sheila, and I took the dinghy to the dock, walked thirty yards across to the other side of the cay, and explored the reef there. In the sea grass shallows there were countless thousands of two inch long golden striped fish in endless schools and layers. Swimming farther, the grass gave way to a strip of white coral sand, and as we reached deeper water we began to see larger fish, sea fans, and colorful coral formations.

    We spent a good hour floating among the coral heads and branches. Swimming around a large mass of coral I came upon a four foot shark resting on the bottom, its head halfway inserted under a ledge. I backed up, got Sheila's attention, and we swam back to take another look, the video camera turned on. This time the shark saw us. It started, jerking back a bit, and then leisurely turned and swam off into the slightly hazy water.

  We prepared to leave sometime after ten o'clock. The electric winch clattered, reeling in the anchor chain, and then suddenly stopped. Kneeling on the trampoline and looking over the front, I could see that the chain disappeared underneath a very large coral head. We were stuck. Snagged!

John put the engines in reverse slowly while I continued to peer over the front. I could see that the chain curved off at a different angle on the other side of the coral, so all we had to do was maneuver the stern while backing to straighten the anchor line, and we'd be free. John expertly did that, we finished anchor-cranking, and we were under way at last.

            There are a couple of different ways of planning a course between the cays. One mind set dictates that since we are on a sailboat, part of the fun would be to actually use the sails, even if it means sailing a zigzag course, tacking into the wind and taking five or maybe six hours to travel the eight and a half miles to the next destination. 

    A different, equally valid mind set evaluates the situation somewhat differently: The wind is blowing almost directly toward us from the direction we need to go. If we put up the sails it might take most of the day to reach our destination. 
   On the other hand if we turned on the diesels and left the sails down, it wouldn't take more than a couple of hours to reach our next anchorage, and we'd have more time to go snorkeling. Option number two prevailed.

  By one o'clock we were picking up the mooring buoy at Laughing Bird Cay. Two launches were resting their bows on the beach, and we could see people from the dive expedition both in the water and gathered in a palapa - a large open sided thatch roofed shelter on the cay. We ate some lunch and waited. A short time later they all roared off toward Placencia, and we had the island to ourselves, except for the two park rangers that soon came out to collect the $10 per head park fee.

   In the afternoon we all jumped off the back of the boat with masks, fins, and snorkels. The water was forty feet deep, so we couldn't see the bottom, but by the time we had swum fifty yards toward shore we began to see sand and coral far below. In twenty feet of water there was abundant sea grass where we could see conchs inching along.

     The main population of coral was in water ten to twelve feet deep, intersected by random slightly deeper sandy bottom channels. The water was deep enough so that no one had to worry about accidentally kicking any of the delicate coral, and deep enough that there were abundant varieties of medium size fish. We saw angelfish and butterfly fish, yellow tangs and funny little cleaner wrasse. 

     We all saw spotted rays and a black ray flapping along slowly near the bottom. We swam watchfully six feet above a four foot long barracuda that was hovering completely motionless a few inches above the sandy bottom watching us. Jane saw a large shark go finning off toward deeper water as we approached.

   The wind had died by five o'clock, and we sat on the aft deck sipping cold beer and watching the sun edge down toward a clear horizon. A distant haze turned the sinking sun deep red, and the clouds higher above the western horizon were arrayed from peach to apricot to tangerine to orange to scarlet to red to dark, dark red. Above all that a two day old thin crescent moon shone against a darkening azure sky.