Hide and Seek, Vava'u, Kingdom of Tonga

Waterlogged Date: 6/22/97

Tonga is unique. It would be a marvelous place for a game of underwater hide and seek. Caves, caverns, swim throughs, archways, pinnacles, ridges, massive rocks split in two, plenty of places to hide. It would be great fun with a rebreather, but otherwise those bubbles would give it away almost every time. Although it is easy to miss the small things here, I played a game of hide and seek with a mimic octopus, elegant squat lobster, frogfish, many eels and teasing anemonefish. For a week I dived with Dolphin Pacific Divers in Vava'u, a small island group in the north of the Kingdom of Tonga. Karen Ruffle, the manager, claimed the visibilty was bad, but I could not help noticing that I could see entire dive sites from the surface and make out the details. I could do just that at Hunga Magic, a site with massive boulders and deep gullies. The earth here appears to have cracked and been shoved forcefully back together forming a ridge of jagged pinnacles, like the back of a stegosaurus. What is magic about Hunga Magic? The soft corals. Dendronepthya corals grow under boulders, on jagged rocks along the edges of the gullies and densely cover the stegosaurus' spines in colors of red or orange or purple. Each spine sported a different color combination. At Sharkstooth (at Kitu) we swam along a wall, through a wide mouthed cavern, make a sharp left turn inside and then came out the other side to see an impressive underwater natural bridge, the Sharkstooth, connecting the top of our cave to the plateau outside. Topside the islands around Vava'u remind me of Palau. Small green, flat topped islands surrounded on all sides by shear rock cliffs are scattered throughout the area. Caves, holes and streaks in the rock give some of the dive sites their names. The islands are eroded by the sea and at low tide they each have the look of a mushroom, a large round head on a thick trunk rising from the sea. I did one spectacular dive after another. There were not as many fish as in the Solomons, but I saw an abundance of anemonefish that were easily photographed. An extraordinary number of the anemones were pure white! One spot at the end of "King Neptune's Sea Fan Grotto" on the island of Tu'ungasika is named "Clownfish Heaven" for good reason. It is swarming with anemonefish. It is one of the dives I remember from my first visit here in '89. Their anemones are nestled down in the branching corals. Several varieties of anemonefish, numbering in the hundreds, hover a foot or more above the reef and dive into their anemone to hide when approached by divers. Photography here is difficult. The surge made it impossible to stay still and there was no place to rest a knee, elbow or finger to steady myself. Karen and I made my final night dive in front of the Tongan Beach Resort with a purpose. To seek out and photograph the (suspected) mimic octopus I had seen there the night before. We patrolled the area side by side in a search pattern looking for the creature, but had no luck. However, our search was interrupted by the finding of a beautiful squat lobster in a crinoid. After a week of Karen showing me the sites and sights of Tonga, I was finally able to show her something. It was the first elegant squat lobster she had ever seen and it was a giant! Its orange and brown striped body with arms outstretched was at least one and 1/2 inches long. It had outgrown our game of hide and seek. The mimic octopus remains the winner. Dolphin Pacific Divers, operates out of the Tongan Beach Resort and has a booking office in Neiafu. Contact them at kami@netstorage.com Report by Deb Fugitt

Send us an email.