| What does it mean when you discover the source of magic? Diving Rangiroa has always been great First the simple act of discovery and rediscovery Progressing to renewed skills, familiarity, expectations And of course the sheer wonder of the living sea And all this with my personal world models racing into complex systems I don't remember if any one of the dives of my first two too short visits was especially better than the others But the third time round, having to suffer six nights in paradise because of problems with flight connections One dive suddenly stood head and shoulders above the rest Kia Ora's in house dive leader had gone without replacement So henceforth diving was with Raie Manta Club and a more mixed clientele drawn from several Rangiroa accommodations That afternoon seemingly no different from other dive days Outside Tiputa Pass a largish group rolled out of the inimitable Zodiac and descended sixty pristine feet Into wall to wall sharks Just reefies, nothing we weren't used to, but the numbers And the dive stayed high So high the details just disappeared into the general impression of an experience that was simply over the top Even the compulsory deco run was a classic rendition Of the widely acclaimed Tiputa Pass tidal drift But all the details quickly submerged below that central memory of pure unadulterated magic. A year later, a sensible four night stay scheduled Should one ever risk trying to recapture real magic? Three standard dives, that is standard here, exceptional anywhere else The Raie Manta gang wanted an afternoon's recovery And they had nearly exhausted all their current clientele But my few Aussie dollars and some Japanese yen Had “Mrs Thatcher” pushing us outside Tiputa Pass on a sunny afternoon A small group of better than competent divers dropped 25 feet To a colourfully lit array of coral and fishes We routinely meandered to the edges of the abyss At forty feet where the slope steepens and at sixty where it falls away I had had sufficient of micro scenes on the previous few dives So I determined to just hang and drift twenty feet off the near vertical face, a lazy eighty below the ruffled surface And then it hit me, the source of last years magic The sinking sun refracted at just the right angle To silhouette the ever changing intermix of schools Of fry and tiddlers, typicals and bigger fish All going about their business in their chosen areas I stayed off the wall (and had a memorable head on with a barracuda) Eventually the shark count got to 23 plus 3 or 4 eagle rays But this day was no match for last year, it was only a bit better than great But also this day I managed to discover that one specific source of magic So now when time and tide is right, I might make that magic come again Not just for me but to share with others And the next day we dived there with dolphins. |
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