Bora Bora Vacation Pictures

A fantastic trip to Club Med - Bora Bora - August 2005. The island is everything you would expect. A great place to dive, snorkel, jetski, or just lay on the beach and unwind.

Club Med Bora Bora offers scuba diving as an excursion. A dive guide from an outside dive shop (TopDive) comes to the club the night before and you can sign up for diving the next day. They pick you up the next morning at the club and take you to their shop where you can rent equipment and board one of their boats.

The dive shop offered a variety of dives including manta ray and shark feeding dives.

There was a wide variety of sharks found outside of the motus near Bora Bora. (Motus are islands that surround the island of Bora Bora and protect the beaches from the outer ocean waves.) This is one of the lemon sharks which are considered to be "dangerous" in some books and "harmless unless provoked" in other books. It was said that they have never had a problem with the sharks in Bora Bora. Maybe they just keep them well fed! The sharks also seem to stay outside the motus so they don't have a problem with swimmers at the beach.

This shot was taken during the shark feeding. The lemon shark took a bite off a piece of food and headed right towards me with it hanging out of its mouth. Just as I was taking his picture he opened his mouth to chomp it down. What great luck!

The sharks seemed to enjoy having their pictures taken. In the background you can see the dive shop videoographer taking a video of the dive.

All photos were taken with an ikelite Auto 35 camera using the external Substrobe, water correcting lens, flash deflector, and 200 speed 35mm film.

At one point during the dive I took a 360 degree look around and was able to count 11 sharks. They were all at different depths from just a few feet off the bottom to just a few feet under the surface. As you can see in this photo they were everywhere!

The airlines between the states and Tahiti seem to be fairly consistent with what you would expect. However, the flights between Tahiti and Bora Bora are very restrictive in their luggage regulations. They limit the size and weight of the baggage you can check and carry on. The inter-island plane was a small prop model with very small carry-on luggage bins. Due to these luggage regulations I elected to rent gear locally. I brought my own mask, snorkel, fins, camera, and dive computer. I was glad I brought my dive computer since the rental setup did not have a depth gauge!

The dives were all lead by a dive guide. This was one of the many black tip sharks.

Since the island is south of the equator, the month of August is part of their winter season. The weather was quite windy for a couple of days and it felt cool and whipped up the waves and sand. A G.O. at the front desk had said the wind was typical for that time of year. The rest of the days it was beautiful with sunny warm days and nights without any humidity. I can imagine in the summer it might be a little to warm, but for this trip the weather was almost perfect. This picture shows a gray reef shark.

There was a much different attitude towards fish feeding in French Polynesia compared to the Caribbean. They feed everything in French Polynesia. The snorkel boats hand out bread before you get in the water. The dive guides bring bread in their BC pockets as well as bring food down for the shark feeds. Here you see a remora who followed the dive guide for almost the entire dive. Every now and then a piece of bread would escape the guide's BC pocket and would be quickly snatched up by the remora.

The average visibility for most of the diving was about 60-100 feet. The only area where the visibility was not as good was in the channel where you could only see about 20 feet. The visibility did not improve even at depth down to 90 feet. This was the only location the dive boat was finding the manta rays. It was worth it in that I did two dives here and did see a few manta rays. I just wish the water was clearer so I could get better photographs.

No trip to Bora Bora would be complete without seeing some of the clams. They come in a large variety of shapes and sizes.

Without clams, there would be no Tahitian pearls.

The beauty of Bora Bora extends far beyond the sites underwater. The island itself is all the beauty one would think of when imagining a tropical paradise. Because the island is so far away from any mainland, it has not been as developed as some of the Caribbean islands. This beauty comes at a cost in that everything is very expensive which makes the all-inclusive's like Club Med the best deal in my opinion. The diving and excursions are extra but almost everything else is included.

We went on the jetski/ATV excursion which was expensive but worth every penny! It is truly the best way to see the island. You drive around the entire island on the jetski sheltered from the outer waves by the motus. The pristine unspoiled beaches are stunning. You stop on one of the motus where you get on ATVs and ride through the jungle collecting food for your snack on the outer side of the motu facing the ocean. Then you drive the ATVs back to your jetski for a short trip back to the club. This excursion is not to be missed!

A great destination with great diving!