It's Shark Week!!!

You will be able to tell when I'm roughing up the sharks, by the quick shakeyness (shakiness) of the camera (or maybe Caleb was shaking with fear...you'll never know with all his lying). The "Captain" actually told us, if a shark gets close to you just punch it in the face. But seriously, (this is Victoria) I thought it would be a lot scarier than it was. I actually tried to swim at and pet a shark, but the closest I got was about 2 feet away (which equates to approximately 3.1415 meters.

I actually punched them all in the face before anyone else got in the water, so they didn't bother the people very much. Except when the one shark ate the "Frenchman" that got too close with his camera.

You also had to watch out for their quick bites as displayed in this first video.





Here's a video of Sharky McDoogal. The video doesn't make him look very big, but he was probably twice as big as the other sharks you see, at least 20 meters long and 40 meters wide.



In this next one you can see them shoot their torpedo fish at their prey.





"So long and thanks for all the fish"

"Mana" the Sting Ray

(Continued colorless commentary commence...)

Or was that "Sting" the manta ray?
no not this guy...


Who would have thought you could strap these things to your feet and glide through the water like a person with sting rays strapped to their feet? Video proof is below. It happened. Just kidding, it's a metaphor...no but seriously, that actually happened.

I'm not sure what happened, I may have started to worry about the storage space on our SD card, but the first video is a little short.

The "Secret Coral Garden"

Unfortunately in order to embed the videos in the blog, we have to edit the blog in HTML, this means it becomes very inconvenient to change the color of the text. So you'll just have to guess which part should be "Purple" and which part should be red.

Me and Victoria (or Victoria and I) were so nice to the fish in the coral garden. We literally had them eating out of the palm of our hands. There was nothing they wouldn't do for us. They actually asked us to come over for dinner, but we had to turn them down for 2 reasons. 1, we already made reservations, and 2, we had eaten enough raw fish for the week.



We actually had some other fun videos of the coral gardens, but, currently, there are some technical difficulties with these videos.

If the video doesn't work on your computer, just imagine it like the scene in The Little Mermaid where the fish make a cyclone around Ariel, except that Caleb will be playing the role of Ariel. Enjoy!

Stay Tuned...

Please stay tuned. We're home and almost settled. We'll post more pictures and videos this weekend.

Thanks!!

Things we miss...

1. our families
2. mexican food
3. pizza
4. less than 100% humidity
5. smart phones
6. knowing how much we're paying for things
7. being able to approximate distances

"Stalker" fish is really stalkery...

We had dinner last night, and the "stalker" fish would not stay away from us.

This is carpaccio mahi mahi.  They were really good.  We didn't see the stalker fish while we were eating, but he showed up in our pictures.  It appeared the stalker fish was not very happy with our choice of appetizer.

This was risotto with parmesan cheese chips at the top and a tomato sauce (it kind of tasted like pizza sauce.  Again the "stalker" fish showed up, but he was more stealthy this time.

Victoria had mustard encrusted veal medallions for the main course. You can see that the "Stalker" fish approves with a wink.

 This was regular shrimp (though it was suppose to be tiger prawns) which were okay, with some sort of potato pancake thing underneath, mixed with some vegetables.  After looking at the pictures, we noticed the "stalker" fish was upset.  He did not like the fact that we were eating his buddies.

This was an apple spring roll, and some ice cream with hard triangular pieces of chocolate in between the layers.  Kind of like a cake.  I forgot what the thing is on the right, but it was all very good.  The stalker fish showed up again, and was very jealous that we got to eat such good desserts.  The thing on the right is a creme brule spring roll.

Plants...?

Here are some flower pictures and what Victoria thinks is a guava agave plant...

For some reason this one was turned side ways when it was uploaded, but now i can't figure out which way is up; so the right side of this picture or the left is actually the top.  You choose.

We found Sharky McDoogal!!!

The highest rating on the DUMB scale was definitely swimming with the sharks.  This was also, by far, number one on the BTWDY scale.  The "Captain" had to take us out beyond the sand bar in order to swim with the sharks.  This would be into the darker blue water, which is a little scary.  It's probably 50 feet of water, but every time I asked the "captain" about water depth, he answered in meters.  Stinkin' metric system.  It's almost as confusing as trying to convert francs into dollars in my head.  Vacation math = stress.

I was the first one in the water of our group of 7.  So i had the job of fighting off all of the aggressive sharks.  After I was done convincing the dangerous sharks to leave (with my fists), the only sharks that were left were black tip reef sharks, and lemon sharks.  I'm pretty sure we saw a jaguar shark as well, but i'm not an expert.  

You should be able to tell what is what, but I'll explain it to you just in case.  The black tip reef sharks sure have a mouth on them.  The would not shut up, and every other word they said was a cuss word.  The lemon sharks seemed to be shy, and pretty much kept to themselves.  It seemed the black tip reef sharks wanted all of the attention... 

This is the area where we stopped to swim with the sharks.  I'm not sure you can tell, but this is behind the sand bar, that basically surrounds Bora Bora.

The "Captain" said these are called trigger fish.  They all felt a lot better after I roughed up some of the aggressive sharks to make them move out of the area. 

...Shark!  The sharks came really close to us.  I think I was probably within 2 feet of one, or maybe it was meters, I don't know.

This shark was carrying a torpedo.  It was fun to watch the sharks shoot torpedoes at their prey in order to stun their prey before they ate them.

This shark decided he wanted to try and be a dolphin, but he didn't do a very good job.  He did however catch some food in his mouth, that or he ate a seagull.  I was a little worried when the "captain" said he was going to stay on the boat and feed the sharks from there.  It's like I always say when your tour guide won't participate, you might be in danger...

As you can see the sharks are bad mouthing each other and about to get into a fight.  Needless to say, I stepped in and calmed them down, before things got out of hand/fin.

This shark didn't like me intervening so he decided to attack me.  He was near sighted, so every attempt at eating me was actually kind of funny as he wasn't even close to me.  You can tell he's near sighted because if you look real closely, you can see that he has a monocle.

This picture might be the best picture we have for various reasons.  This is actual size!

Here's another shark with a torpedo, and some fish and another shark.  If you look really closely (put your glasses on mom), you can see our stalker fish in the upper left corner of this picture.  We didn't even photo-shop him in.  We just turned around and BAM, there he was.  No respect!

The sharks were actually circling us like when we were with the sting rays.  I feel like they were wanting to eat either me or Victoria, but we didn't let that happen.  We tried to offer the french guy from the other picture, but apparently sharks are picky.

 You can't see him very well here, if you click on the picture to make it bigger, maybe you can see it better.  But this is Sharky McDoogal.  He was probably twice the size of me, but he never came off of the ocean floor. 

Here is one of the shark's torpedoes.  If you click on the picture to make it bigger you can actually see that the torpedoes are solar powered by solar panels on the fish's head.

Here's Sharky McDoogal again. 

These are pictures of tiny baby sharks.  See how big Victoria's hand is in comparison? The sharks were probably like 100 meters away in this picture, but maybe it was only a 100 feet.  Who knows.  But that is my hand.  See my pink watch?

Another boat came to swim with the fish via scuba diving, rather than snorkeling, so all of the fish left to go to the other boat that was not out of food.  Fish are so needy and high maintenance!

And we are on our way back to home base.  We kept getting sprayed in the face on the way back to our resort.  The "captain" wasn't the best driver, but at least he kept us from getting eaten by sharks and rays (even if he did let our stalker fish friends come within 50 feet of us, or maybe it's meters, I can't remember).

Sting Rays, more like Sucker Rays...

Our "captain" had to take us all the way to the other side of the island to go see the sting rays.  These were not manta rays, they are sting rays.  Don't get them mixed up; it hurts their feelings.  This would be 1 higher on the danger-under-my-boat scale (Otherwise known as the DUMB scale) than swimming with the fish at the coral garden.  Also this would be the 2nd best thing we did on the BTWDY scale.  (I had to change the scale name to BTWDY because "yesterday" is no longer today (So now the new name is pronounced be-tweed-dee)).

Anyways, sting rays are a sensitive creature.  We were told by our "captain" not to step on them, not to grab their tale, not to make sudden movements, not to make fun of them, and most importantly, don't call them manta rays.  They are also very aggressive.  Several of them tried to eat us.  But since all they can do to eat is inhale, they were not very successful.  Some people left the rays with battle scars, or as i like to call them hickeys.  Little known fact - a sting ray would have to be huge and have a very powerful set of lung equivalents in order to have a mouth large enough and enough suction to inhale a whole human. (Please keep in mind that many of the "facts" in this story are not accurate.  Don't quote us for your science project Liz. Try wikipedia instead.)  I think it's pretty common knowledge that a whole human can't fit through a normal sized sting ray's mouth, let alone be completely inhaled.  So, Liz, if you want, feel free to use this information at school and impress the teachers with vast underwater life knowledge that is on this blog post.  Just don't forget to cite your sources!!!!

 This is about the place on the other side of the island that we met the sting rays.

What normally looked like coral were actually sting rays.  It was funny to watch them swim over to the boat.  Yes those dark spots are sting rays. It was a little ominous as we sat in our boat and began to see the rays surround us.

The sting rays would swarm any human-being who made fun of them, called them a manta ray, or whom they thought might have food.  When swarming they would try to destroy the human by eating them, but as described earlier, they were not big enough.

 Here's a sting ray.  Sting rays feel like slimy wet leather.  I petted them.  I was a little bit scared because I really didn't want to step on them.  When the "captain" fed them near me, they all swarmed me and knocked me over.  They're pretty strong.

And here are a couple of sting rays ignoring a fish pretending to be a sting ray, but the fish was unsuccessful. 

This shark made fun of a sting ray. As you can see, the sting ray tried to stab the shark, out of an emotional out pour of anger, with his stinger, but the sting ray was confused and stabbed the shark's shadow by mistake.  By the way this shark was circling us like he was picking which one of us he wanted to eat. 

more pictures of the shark picking which one of us he wanted to eat, and more sting rays being annoyed by the shark making snarky comments about them. I think one of the sting rays was scared of the shark because he started burrowing under the sand.  Or maybe he was just ashamed because Caleb kept calling him a "mana ray".  I was calling them sting rays.  I wouldn't dare make that mistake twice.

 This sting ray was trying to be a scroll.

Our captain knew exactly the time for us to get out of the water before the shark attacked.  So we were on our merry way to the next destination.

Feed the fish, tuppence a bag...

Today was super busy.  We went out in the Hobie Cat, but the camera did a weird fogging thing that made the pictures look like we were dreaming.  Anyways, we won't post them for now since we got some great pictures on our excursion.

The "captain" picked us up at 1 pm and we set sail for a coral garden.  We didn't really set sail as it was a boat with a motor, but what ever floats your boat.  It was fun and full of fish, and not just any fish, but full of the "STALKER" fish!!! 0.o  Still, this only ranks 3rd on the best-thing-we-did-today scale; we can just call this the BTWDT scale (pronounced be-twid-it, and soon this will probably become the BTWDoV scale ("oV" being "on Vacation" (pronounced be-twid-ov))).

The "captain" gave us food to lure the fish with, but I had a small crisis of conscience when he told us it was tuna.  Victoria soon realized she was not a fish, and was not going to be eating the tuna (though she did eat some tuna earlier on vacation, but she still wasn't a fish then, so it was okay), so it was okay to feed one type of fish to the others. Fish eating fish = cannibalism. In your face.  What else can they eat?  it's not like they are above water and can eat things that don't swim in the ocean.  In your eye.

At first there were only a few fish eating the tuna, but that didn't last long

Then more came (notice how many "stalker" fish there are now)

And more came...

And more...

And even more...

It didn't stop till we were lifted out of the ocean by piles and piles of fish. 

Then we ran out of tuna so they didn't care for us any more.  so they all left.

And we were on our way to the next stop of our excursion.

Monday Review...

Here are a few pictures from our Monday.  It was a busy day.  I read for a couple of hours while Caleb snorkeled.  I went out to sea twice today.  Tomorrow should be really busy though.  We're scheduled to go out in the "hobie-cat" at 10 and then we have our shark excursion at 1.  I've been practicing not being scared of things in the water.  We'll see how it goes.  We should get some good pics out of it.  

Caleb got some nice sunrise pics.

The squiggly pattern in the rock is a clam. We found one in the ground,
but couldn't dig it up to see if there was a pearl inside.  I guess Caleb
will just have to buy me one instead.

This ugly guy (above) must be important to the region as we have
a portrait of him in our room.

We didn't find time to miss our stalker butterfly fish friend today.