Into the Blue

• 01 June 2026
• french polynesia

Dear and faithful readers, once again we have left you hanging for a bit. If your hearts have not grown immensely with fondness for this little blog, I think we can all agree to dispel the idea that distance makes the heart grow fonder. However, if you find your heart bursting with joy, much like the Grinch, then we have some solid evidence absence is good for the heart.

So whatever size your heart, on to our heart-to-heart. Since last we spoke Sarah and I had some special guests! I really should have made them write a special guest post, but given one of them is a writer for a living it seemed a big ask. And it was hard to remember to ask amongst all the adventures and drinks that were had.

The Brits, as they are fondly known in Roslyn, decided to hop on a plane for a brief flight over the Pacific to French Polynesia. We met them in Papeete, the capital on the island of Tahiti, and sent James off to go do a refresh dive on his own, since Sarah and I didn't wait for him. This proved to be a fortuitous event! Meanwhile Sarah led Victoria and myself on a walking tour of Papeete to visit many fine, but unfortunately closed, establishments, like the local brewery.

I suppose this view will do.

We then flew out to Rangiroa, the second largest atoll in the world. Think a tiny strip of land encompassing a giant lagoon, some 35km x 80km. I am finally shaking off some of that US imperialism and converting to the metric system, which definitely has no imperial history. But it does have a sane history.

Why hello there beautiful tropical atoll

I'm not entirely sure what to say about Rangiroa. Imagine every picturesque tropical postcard you've seen. The water and lagoons are that color everywhere. The turquoises, the greens, the blues. In fact the land itself is by far the least interesting part of Rangiroa, so it's no surprise that diving, snorkeling, and water activities were the main reason we visited.

Tropical Krew

The first house we rented had its own private little beach and a wonderful little coral reef. If that wasn't reason enough to snorkel, there were also lots of mosquitoes everywhere. So into the water!

And back to James's fortuitous dive in Tahiti, we were recommended a local dive shop (there are six on Rangiroa, and with a population around 2.5k I suspect may be the largest number of dive shops per capita in the world). It started out with us getting picked up by a very disgruntled Frenchman, who demanded to know where we were from after we failed at opening the van door. Unsure of how the van door might operate differently for an American or Brit, we gave the man his answer to be told "pull harder." So with what might be considered an awkward or uncomfortable silence, he drove us to his dive shop. I mostly found the situation hilarious.

Then we met our dive instructor, and kept getting told to prepare for "The Lolo Experience." Friends, I don't care how good of a diver you are, nobody is ready for the Lolo Experience. He's a mad (in a mostly good way) Frenchman that shows you incredible sights underwater while replanting corals and stopping in a sheltered spot from the current, with barely enough room for one person, and then giving you a questioning look as to why you are continuing to drift away in the current, and can't just be cool and casual and stop like him, the guy in the only spot anybody could possibly stop.

He also introduced us to the new sport of underwater rock climbing. The key pieces of this sport are to dive along a very cool pass into the atoll, with a very strong current, and cling desperately to rocks, and then try to pull yourself upstream. In the pre-dive briefing, he explained if you float away the boat will simply pick you up in the middle of the lagoon. If they can find you. I think he was joking, but he's a mad frenchman, so it's hard to say.

The payoff of the Lolo Experience? Turtles, blacktip reef sharks, gray sharks, silvertip sharks, dolphins, barracuda, eagle rays, etc. I have never seen that diversity in fish and pelagics before in one spot.

I had also never experienced diving into the blue. We drop in off a boat and head down toward the reef, but it quickly drops off. From there we turn out toward the open ocean and slowly swim away into the deepest, most beautiful blue I've ever seen. And then fish start to appear, sometimes in schools of thousands. And then a dolphin came and swam over to check us out, but mostly to say hi to Lolo, who she knew well. Fortunately we could just turn around and still see the reef since visibility was so high. But definitely one of the coolest experiences of my life.

Mata the Dolphin, and Lolo, sole proprietor of the Lolo Experience

The Blue

And then the real icing on the cake was seeing two hammerhead sharks! Rangiroa is one of their last strongholds, as they've mostly been killed off in the Mediterranean. There are around 130 sharks around Rangiroa, and we saw two of them swimming through the pass. They are a surreal sight, and it's definitely a sighting that will stick with me forever.

In fact, I made sure of it, I got my very first tattoo! The manta rays and hammerhead sharks are some of the most stunning sea creatures I've ever seen, and tattooing is a cultural art form in French Polynesia. So it only seemed fitting.

And now? We are in Melbourne, Australia, visiting my sister Sierra!

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