37

That's the number of skiffs I can see in motion right now from the sun deck of the boat. The lagoon is alive with 40 HP Yamaha powered 20' fiberglass hulled skiffs. If this were Somalia, I'd be nervous right now. All is well, though, as everyone is headed to town to buy food for Christmas. Looks like the 24th is THE day to shop in Chuuk. Shopping for the boat is complete, so I get to kick back and watch the world, or at least a good portion of Chuuk's population, go by.

Merry Christmas to all.

Sized Up

Below entry leads me to another point: it is thrilling on a basic, primordial level to be sized up, eyeballed by something hungry of another species and know it is trying to figure out a) if you're tasty and b) how getting a chance to sample you balances on the risk/reward scale. Would probably be less thrilling and more terrifying if there was anything in the lagoon bigger than me, but no such luck so far. I'm going to keep looking, though.

Running Interference

It being the Pacific, we get that clouds of tropical fish all over the place effect that looks so cool in coffee table book photos and BBC documentaries. You know the shot I’m talking about, the one where the cameraman approaches the edge of a reef thick with a wall of scintillating, brightly colored fish that, at some predetermined signal, some minimum safe disturbance distance, scatter en masse, startling down into the reef for a few seconds to cower until one of them gives the all clear signal and they ease their way back into the water column? We have that here, as well as the schools of baitfish whirling and flowing in circles and patterns phenomenon. The fish inside the lagoon aren’t typically as brightly colored as what you’d see on the reef outside, but they behave similarly, have the same schooling groupthink mentality which includes either slowly edging away from or outright fleeing noisy bubble blowing divers, depending upon the speed of said divers’ approach. Ease up on them without making noisy exhalations or sudden movements and you can actually get close to the fish clouds. As soon as you breathe or twitch, though, they almost always move away. Almost always.

Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes, if you’re close to a reef or the mast of a wreck, they even edge towards you. Get close to you. Snuggle up right next to you as if, despite the fact that you are a big bubble blowing monster, you aren’t the scariest thing around. Almost like they’re using you as...cover. That’s when to start looking around, because somewhere on the other side of you is a guy who looks something like this: