Tahitian Islands, July '99 - We finally got married on July 11 and left the long days of a New England summer for a place where it was winter. Well, OK, so summer and winter don't make much difference in the tropics.

We started on the atoll of Manihi which is a very old volcano where the crater had collapsed into itself leaving a nearly continuous ring of land just barely above the ocean's surface.

The land was barren lava and coral rocks

with a few coconut palms,

and lots of crabs, but wildlife doesn't amount to so much as a lizard. Underwater was a different story. The diving was great, but our camera was giving us trouble, and we don't have many pictures. The best dive was a drift through the only opening to the ocean with a current at about 8 knots. On this one dive we saw 8 Manta Rays which had our dive master as excited as we ever saw him. Other dives included the wall which surrounds the atoll and drops to a depth of 5,000 feet. There were 4-foot reef sharks, and smaller fish of every imaginable color including lionfish, but much to Dawn's disappointment, no clownfish. I felt that the colors black and white were more prevalent than I've seen in the Carribean. Here's Dawn's commentary. We bought a disposable underwater camera and did get a few shallow shots: Here's us posing behind a school of convicts.

Our next stop was a much younger island where the central jagged volcanic peak has not yet completely eroded away. There's still an outer ring of coral at the edge of the original volcano.

The place is called Bora Bora with its famous silouette.

The diving was great again, and to my surprise, somewhat different. We missed pictures of 8 foot Lemon Sharks, but finally got the camera working again.

Finally, Dawn got to see her clownfish!
On our last dive at night, many of the critters were in pairs - the perfect honeymoon dive.
Unfortunately, not all the pictures were well centered.

After the diving was over, we took a kayak and went snorkelling with the macro camera.