Fun says:
So far, I've been on many adventures on my longggg stay here. Mauna Kea, Cave Spelunking(read about it in vincent's post soon), close encounters with the whales, visits to beautiful valleys and some other cool stuff.
None however, came close to what i've experienced tonight first hand.
The night dive with one of the gentle giants of the pacific. The Manta Ray (aka Devil Ray)
Well im sure most people would know or at least heard of what a Manta Ray is. If not. Check wiki =D. Nah, ill just try and describe it. Its a fish, stemmming from that of the Shark family. It can attain incredible sizes over its long lifespan, 30ft is what i heard from our manta videographer. Thats 9meters long. We're not talking about tip of its head to the end of its tail. We're talking about wing tip to wing tip. Another good estimation of how huge these things are - for each foot of the manta, its a 100 pounds. An average adult female would be around 12-13ft long. What makes it the Devil Ray u may ask? Its the "horns" they have on the tip of their head which they unfurl when they are not feeding. So yea they look pretty mean with those.
Time for the main course.
Vincent and I took a boat out from the harbour and headed towards a small congregation of like 8 boats. All preparing to watch the mantas in the approaching night. After a quick briefing and education talks, we were told to suit up and jump in! While i was wearing my flippers, the captain of the boat pointed one manta out to me. It was huge. it was as wide as the platform i was on. This made me pretty apprehensive in entering the water lol. But i jumped in in the end.
Okay, about how this works. The Manta's eat only plankton, microscopic little buggers in the ocean, which are attracted to light. So what these dive companies do is that they set a strong light box at the bottom of the reef, and have divers sit around in a circle and shine their torches up. The snorkelers on the other hand (like myself) had to float on the surface and shine our light DOWN. This creates a huge column of light for the manta's to take the stage and put on and awesome display. To be honest i was quite disappointed to be snorkeling cause i figured id get the shorter end of the stick coz i couldnt hold my breathe long enough and stuff like that. And that the show from below probably looked more spectacular.
But i was very fortunately wrong.
Shining a torch from the bottom up (divers), meant that the manta would swoop over your head in a huge loop/somersault and gape their huge mouths open and score some plankton. Pretty awesome you might think? Let me give you another scenario.
Shining a torch from the top down (Snorkelers), lead to the manta's doing a flip right underneath you. So its kinda like hes trying to belly touch your belly. The REALLY cool thing about this is. They are like. An inch away from you when they do this. And with each loop. They get closer. and closer. AND CLOSER. When his huge mouth gapes at you, its pretty intimidating. He cant process all the fat i have to offer anyway so that wasnt a biggie, he just goes for his plankton.
Each time a manta did that loop beneath us you could hear everyone exclaiming through their masks, causing only muffled yelps of excitement to be heard. It was pretty funny to hear people swearing each time they got too close for comfort.
Another amazing thing was how surreal everything looked at night in the open ocean. Schools of fish joined in the feeding frenzy, shimmering like opals and mirrors under all the light emitting from all around them. Rings and pockets of bubbles found their way to the surface from the masks and tanks of the divers beneath us. A whole myriad of glints and twinkles bounced off the bubbles and the silver bodied fish, creating a glorious spectacle. Just when you thought it doesnt get any better than that, a 13ft Manta glides out of the looming darkness and casts its silhouette on the light below, doing his graceful gluttonous dance. And more mantas join the party, from all directions, blocking out the lights and enjoying their meal.
A couple of close encounters would include vincent and myself swearing in every possible way we knew how as "Sugar Ray" (the name of that particular manta as the veteran divers endearingly call it.) a huge female manta did her dance right beneath us. The videographer lady was right beneath us with her very bright lights (hence very much more plankton), and the Sugar just kept going loops and loops and loops under us! Like 10 or more times in a row! Each time it seemed she was gonna end up kissing us! Vincent got grazed lightly on the chest by her tail and i was staring right into her eyes! No amount of words coming from this post can describe how we felt. I even bumped into one of them, ( well, she bumped into me.) I felt someone pushing my fins away, which did happen earlier coz there were so many people! so i looked back and instead of seeing some kid kicking me, i saw a manta doing a loop and pushing my fins back! It was a really really crazy feeling!
about 45mins later we were told to head back to our boat. ( MAJOR BUMMER. I felt i could have stayed there till dawn.) We changed out and enjoyed a nice star lit ride back to the harbour. And we bought the dvd of our little adventure and gotta go collect it tomorrow! So hopefully we can get that on the blog. But heres a lil video from youtube to give u guys a general idea!
P.S im sorry this post is kinda disoriented. I myself am still reeling in pure excitement today. so this is all kinda rambling hahahaha.
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