me, in a helicopter (just having lost lens cap)

beautiful bora bora	bora bora
the heart-shaped island of tupai	a resort... can't remember which one!
divers, from the air	where I sit to work. :)

Helicopters are so cool! We went up in one today to photograph the island, and I managed to get some pretty neat shots from the air. At one point I must have stuck my camera too far out of the little window because my lens cap (which was dangling from a lenskeeper elastic string) was ripped off of the lens, doomed to a 3600' drop to the ocean below. So sad! Gotta get another one somewhere.

It's amazing. You can see the sharks swimming around the reef -- they're really BIG. The clarity of the water makes it easy to spot rays, sharks, and schools of fish from the air. We even found TOPdive 1 (the dive boat) and followed it back to the resort -- flying sideways -- so I could photograph it.

In the morning we dove Toopua and were treated to a little dance with a juvenile manta ray, who was flying around the sandy channel in the middle. She glided beneath and above us, allowing us to get very close to her...

juvenile manta ray
little olivier, lucien, and manta	large puffer fish, who is always hanging out here
clownfish and anemone	butterfly fish. they look fake!

After Toopua, we drove out to Tupitipiti to glide again through its crystal clarity. Like last time, I was stunned by the beauty of rays of sunlight piercing through the water's surface. There's no way to capture it on film, but I tried to anyway:

Back to work. Final stretch! It's starting to get stressful, actually. Stress and Bora Bora shouldn't mix.