…from an email dated Mar. 29, 2005
“We sailed north to the Bay of Islands as I reported in my last travelog post, ending the journey at the Cavalli Islands where a wreck called the Rainbow Warrior has been relocated to create a marine preserve. The Rainbow Warrior was a Greenpeace vessel sunk in the 1980s in Auckland Harbor by the French Secret Service! The bombs used to sink it were sneaked into New Zealand aboard yachts and submarines.
Anouk is a licensed PADI Dive Instructor, a real bonus for Mike and me. Although we both had learned to scuba dive in decades past – I in high school and Mike a few years after we met – the technology has changed so dramatically that we both needed to learn the skills again pretty much from scratch.
We have purchased all our necessary dive gear in the town of Kerikeri and are now fully outfitted with tanks, regulators, BCD vests, dive computers, wet suits, etc., ready to undertake our first big scuba adventure. Anouk gave us a refresher course in dive theory and took Mike and me individually on a training dive in clear calm water where we could sink down about ten feet below the surface to a sandy bottom. There we practiced techniques such as clearing our masks, losing and retrieving our masks, sharing air with our “buddy”, hand signals, and other crucial skills.
Having passed Anouk’s inspection, it was on to the Cavallis where we were fortunate to be able to anchor for the night. Usually the sea is rough and choppy in that area, making for an uncomfortable anchorage, but we lucked onto calm conditions. The water was so clear we could look down from the deck of the boat and see individual seashells on the bottom twenty-five feet below. The shipwreck lies at a depth of 20-25 meters, making our inaugural dive quite the exploit.
Anouk and I went first as a buddy pair, and Mike and Rod took their turn after she and I resurfaced. In the clear blue water, the wreck was brightly colored with the pinks, purples, greens, blues, oranges, and yellows of thousands of small reef fish and beds of anemones. We spotted a moray eel and a scorpion fish in addition to hundreds of more common varieties. Anouk scribbled a note to me underwater on her dive slate – “WOW!”. The dive was one of the highlights of our entire vacation and has really whet our appetite for diving in Tonga and Fiji where the water is warmer and the fish even more colorful.”
