Drift dives with the current

In my initial dive, I swim for half an hour in the "aquarium" before heading out to the open sea, hand-in-hand with my gentle hubby, though the weight load of tolling me around is incapacitating him as it shows on his pressure gauge. Unfortunately, the drift dives and current dives are a lot more challenging and harder than I could feel confident with. Throughout the third and fourth dives, Sebastian the French dive guide, as patient as he is, had to hand held me in literal sense. On land a stiff wind blows hard enough to point the fronds of seaside palms northeast toward the Marquesas Islands, but here down below, our most subtle whim of muscle flex permits any direction. All my doubt washes away with my first glimpse at the landscape of the majority of the planet, but my fear remains to be diving against the current albeit in over 150 feet of crystal visibility in every direction.

Amazingly, in all my subsequent dives, I don't witness a single act of fish violence. Part of me is still afraid after watching the National Geographic Channel in this shark invested waters. Here, however, I observe a totally laissez-faire lagoon - literally a rainbow, if not coalition, at least co-tolerance. The Pacific here is Madonna blue, the blue of the Kansas sky on an intense July afternoon. The seafloor is a landscape of mountains and cliffs, a marzipan confection of living coral. We see a school of Platinum Barracuda, a few Somber Napoleons whose body shape could have inspired the design of the first submarine. A Giant Grouper that has "eyebrow" shaped like annoying expression that sits under its veranda roof as if to say, "This place used to be so peaceful and now look at the traffic," as the six of us and the dive guide dawdled by.