After many months of hard work by a variety of people, today Dive Master Ian and I took guests diving for the first time aboard National Geographic Orion. We hadn’t intended it to be an expedition dive, but without local knowledge we resorted to charts, a gut feeling, and a hint from our agent to try the north side of Ifira Island. Although the first dive was a very mellow, shallow dive, we racked up a formidable fish count in less than an hour. Of all the fish the dive teams spotted, it seems that the humphead banner fish caught more eyes than the flamboyantly colored angelfish or pugnacious anemone fish. The humphead banner fish is a curious animal. It’s something you stare at and truly examine. It can stop you mid kick and make you wonder “does that fish have a hole in its head?” However, these brown and white animals are often seen in a mated pair, so how could both have such a distinctive wound in the exact same spot? It’s only after watching them for some time that you realize their exaggerated, concave forehead is just one of the myriad of interesting body parts being flaunted on these electric reef systems.
For our afternoon activities, we repositioned our lovely ship to nearby Lelepa Island for a visit to the Fels Cave UNESCO World Heritage Site. Of course, with water temps in the 80s and a nice lee shore out of the trade winds, some of us went submarine rather than subterranean. With a few more newcomers joining the dive group, this was the final “first dive” of the voyage for us all and an opportunity to explore with a true ocean legend, Valerie Taylor. Through her decades of underwater filmmaking and photography, Valerie has impacted thousands, if not millions of people and helped shape how we view the ocean today. If it weren’t for her work, many of us may have never fallen in love with the deep blue. This was a dive we won’t forget if for no other reason than we all got smoked by Valerie’s fluid fin kicks.
