Pitufa.at

Yesterday we returned to Tahanea’s beautiful south, as the weather’s turned excellent again: blue sky with puffy cumulus and a light southerly breeze. Before we had a couple of overcast, oppressive days while the fringe of a front became stationary over our area and brought northerly winds. So we had to stay in the (in our opinion) boring northern part. Now, the fine weather is ideal for exploring yet another southern anchorage even further to the west. We anchored in the shelter of a long reef with several curious black-tip reef sharks circling Pitufa and inspecting the funny metal thing we had dropped onto the bottom. Today we kayaked around the nearby motus and then strolled from one motu to the next which are (almost continuously) connected by a sandbank. While kayaking back to Pitufa, we repeatedly spotted fountains of spray about a mile away in the lagoon. At first, we were not quite sure what it was, the calm conditions could not cause such breakers and the outer reef is much further away… Of course, WHALES! This must be WHALES! We paddled back us quickly as we could, changed our means of transport and dinghied close to them, put diving goggles on and jumped in the water. It was a mother humpback wale with her baby What an amazing experience… We didn’t stay long though, because we didn’t want to get Mom worried about her baby.