French Polynesia - Part 2

Jean Michel Machefert · Issue 109, Jul/Aug 2019 · pp. 55–60

Products mentioned: Nikon D2x, Aquatica housing, Nikkor 10.5mm, Tamron 18-200mm, Nikon SB-910 strobes, Patima housings

In the first part of this article published in the issue 108 of UWP we visited the high islands of Polynesia and especially Moorea. Now this is time to discover the low islands known as atoll. At 350 km north east of Tahiti and after 1h of flight from the airport of Faa’a, we landed in Rangiroa, in the archipelago of the Tuamotu. The Tuamotu Archipelago with 76 atolls is really the place to go for discovering the flat islands of Polynesia. The atoll of Rangiroa is the second largest atoll of the world (the first one is Kwajalein in the Marshall archipelago) with a length of 200km (the lagoon has a length of 80 km and a width of 32km) and a width of the coral ring always less than 300m. The volcano at the origin of Rangiroa is aged from 61 to 65 millions of years and it is now fully eroded and covered by the lagoon with a maximal depth of 35m now. Outside of the atoll the bottom of the se…