Ua Pou Baie Vaiehu

We met up with Pedro and Erick in Baie Vaiehu. There was a tall cliff filled with goats protecting us from the NW. At the center was a lovely palm filled rocky beach. We decided that the teetering rock on top of the cliff, from our angle, looked like King Kong's head. The other side and on down the coast, were several caves and blowholes. One had a very deep sounding “vavoosh” as the water gushed upwards thru the hole. It was quite loud and I heard it several times during the night, thinking “what was that?” “oh yea, the blowhole”.

We took the dingy down a ways to check out some of the caves and outlying rocky islands. But the main thing we were there for, was the crystal clear water. This was our first chance to have clear enough water to go snorkeling!! Pedro, Erick and I went, as Mike was on his last days of antibiotics. We saw a lot of fish, some in very big schools. The water was the clearest we had seen since we got to the Marquesas. I saw lots of new kinds of fish which I took photos of, in hope of identifying them later in my book. And the corals were quite different than the ones I had seen before too. Some looked like flower blossoms, some like alien cities and some like fat black smokestaks. The variety was quite amazing.