Dangerous creatures: them or us?

So as you can see yesterday was an eventful day!

After working in the morning, we headed to the Motus. They are a couple of small islands right off of Moorea. They are weekend vacation spots, and at that time people crowd them and hang out at the beach, go snorkeling, etc. Since we went in the middle of the week, it was empty. We had lunch, and did a bunch of nice snorkeling around the island. It was great, but chilly! It was overcast, and the wind was blowing, so being in just a bathing suit and a rashguard was cold. I think this was the first time I was cold while I was outside swimming, so it was something. As awesome as all of this was, the best part came on the way back.

We stopped by the boat channel, and got out and tried snorkeling around waiting for the rays! They finally came and they were HUGE! I've been swimming with rays in the Bahamas before, but these seemed to be at least three times those rays' size. When they were vertical, they covered the complete bottom half of my body. They came up and said hello, brushing their entire bodies against me, making me laugh hysterically because they really tickle. The Braveheart crew had brought fish, so we tried feeding them. I'm holding a piece of fish for one in the above picture. They didn't seem too interested. Apparently they get fed by tourists a lot, so they were pretty tame and maybe already stuffed from earlier in the day. As we were feeding them, who would swim up but some blacktipped sharks! There were two. The pictures I have of them aren't too good, but then again, I didn't try to get super close to them. They ate the fish that the rays didn't. Then to top off a whole bunch of coolness, on the way out, there was a huge water spout on the horizon.

Today has been a bunch of database management for me on the computer, and tonight we head out to the Braveheart for Shane's birthday.

Later!
Emily