We had an excursion this morning, the second day anchored at Moorea, to get a little tour of the island and Opunohu Bay by speedboat and the excursion was to end with a visit of some stingrays and a snorkeling spot. We had breakfast and met up with the excursion group. There are some NICE overwater and mountain bungalows around Moorea! The Intercontinental has a new resort that’s beautiful but probably way more than what we could afford as a nightly rate. We got to the area of the ocean where we expected to see the stingrays, but saw something else, too.

That’s right, black-tipped sharks! I was used to rays by now after handling some in the Dominican Republic and petting them at Sea World, but I had never been this close to sharks in the wild. How close? THIS close…



The sharks were pretty docile and didn’t really want to come around people, and the guide was feeding them to get them to come to us. They viewed us as potential threats and not food. The stingrays, on the other hand, knew the guides well and were all over them (and sometimes, us). “Feed me!” “No, feed ME!” “Pet me!” “Pet ME!” You could tell the rays were comfortable because the large bone barb on their tails were pointed down instead of up. They behaved more like dogs, vying for attention. Oh, and I learned that the male of the species has two penises. Each. One lady on the excursion asked, “Why does he need two?” The guide replied, “I don’t know — so if one doesn’t work, he has a spare?” This reminds me of a video we were forced to watch in high school biology, in which a bored-sounded male narrator recited, “The [male] snake has two penises. It can use either one, depending on its positioning.”
After our visit with the carnivores of the sea, we went to the snorkel spot. We had to fight the current to swim to the good parts, but I enjoyed it for the exercise.

Mr. W had fun, too.

Parts of the swim were very shallow, and I was shocked I didn’t get scraped to ribbons going over high-reaching corals. I think there was a lot of divine intervention at work on my behalf that morning, just so we could watch stuff like this:


Look at all those teeny blue baby fishies! And if you think you could just reach out and grab one, well, you’d be wrong. As one fellow excursionist observed, “I think those fish have eyes on the backs of their heads!”
When we were dropped off at the Moorea dock, we shopped with some of the vendors set up in the little square before taking the tender back to the ship.

As Mr. W bought pearl and bone anklets and necklaces for himself and his kids, I bought a wooden tribal carving of a bat ray for my dad (I’d already gotten my mom and grandma certified Tahitian pearl pendants on Bora Bora). He loved it, by the way, and put it on the fireplace among other wooden carved dragons, birds, etc. We got back to the ship in time for lunch.

Late afternoon on deck, we attended Chef Dean Max’s cooking demo on proper preparation of rare ahi tataki. Yum!

Chef Dean is the owner of the Fort Lauderdale seafood restaurant 3030. Very nice guy, friendly, fun-loving, and knowledgable. His lovely wife Amy is very personable, too.

What a pretty backdrop for cooking, right?

His delicious rare tataki with aioli he handmade right there was served with other hors d’oeuvres at the Captain’s farewell party on deck.

The service staff was introduced and waved their farewells.

We prepared to say goodbye to Moorea, as we were going back to our origination of Tahiti that night. This is Moorea from Cook’s Bay. Mr. W merged 3 photos he took at different exposures and then added a special effect. Cool, huh?