Snorkeling

The underwater pictures in this entry are courtesy of Mike. He and Bec spent hours snorkeling the waters of Vanuatu taking pictures of fish and coral. They took some lovely pics and it was hard to decide which ones to use. The swimmer feeding the black damsels is Bec.

We have spent many pleasant hours floating around in our fins, goggles and snorkels just watching the fish play and eat.

The Neptune is a tourist boat that takes people for a 3 hours trip out of Port Vila to Paradise Cove for fish feeding and then back in behind Iririki Island to finish the afternoon off. It is an exceptionally pleasant, and not too expensive, afternoon. The crew of the boat are all local NiVanuatu people.

On reaching Paradise Cove one of the crew throws chunks of bread into the water and you see some large red fin bass and coral trout leap up and snatch the bread as it hits the water. They are quite big fish and spectacular to watch. The spectacle doesn’t end there. We all don our flippers, snorkels and goggles and drop off the back of the boat into the water, taking some bread with us to feed the fish. As soon as we hit the water we are besieged by hundreds of black damsel fish and other beautiful tropicals in an amazing array of fabulous colours. They come right up and eat out of your hands. The children on the trip are just screaming with delight – not to mention the adults who are nearly jumping out of the water in fright as the damsels nibble on assorted body parts!

Another great spot is Hideaway Island where the fish come right up to the beach and there are plenty of reefs to glide over and watch below. Our last trip to Hideaway saw 13 of us piled into the truck to come home. We took some people over and met others there and by the time we came home we had quite a gathering. It is common to see truckloads of local people coming and going but not so common to see a truck load of volunteers! Even the locals were having a good laugh at us on the way home. You could never do it in Australia without being arrested! Mind you Ron was driving very carefully because it had also started to rain! Too bad for the passengers in the tray – Willy got his goggles and snorkel out !!