[singpilot]

The distant, quick repeating red flash in the darkness. The perfect colour of the singular light on the horizon. It’s message crystal clear to any mariner.

The low moon holds the motus in silhouette, but still no shore can be seen there. As the 50-knot speed of the open skiff closes the range to the inner lagoon, the quick red flash now has a new backdrop. The cyclic flare of the sea foam comes over the horizon, the dark curl of the breakers turns to bright white as each wave crests onto the barrier reef. Every 5 or 6 seconds a new set curls and crests, the angle of tonight’s tradewind and resulting sea makes the break start at one end of the barrier and traverse the entire horizon in seconds, that distance being several miles across the field of view. The danger that the distant red bouy predicts is now very real.

I look astern; the glow of the wake from the deep-V at this speed is surprisingly flat, and it arcs into the darkness equally from the perfectly synchronized twin black 225 HP outboards. Their ferocity is damped by the form-fitting sound absorbing engine covers, the scream of their exhaust buried into the core of the seven-thousand RPM stainless steel propellors. Each one of the four blades on the convex cupped hub describing a helical arc thru the sea water, and then the void of that arc filling with the hot exhaust gases injected so very close to the props, making the most incredibly beautiful geometrical underwater display visible to anyone that could have possibly seen it.

The smells change suddenly, drawing me back to reality, someone upwind and ashore burning paper and wood, the bow spray now becoming warmer, the sweet smell of land replacing the pungent sea aroma. The wake curving gently away from the barrier reef and the channel opening, and towards the glow of Vaitape village, now coming into view. A bright chrome-white flash from left and up high, as a bolt of lightning strikes the sacred, highest volcanic peak of BoraBora. The remains of a small thunderstorm has perched on the upflowing tradewinds, their saturated sea-breeze feeding the heat engine clinging to the top of the peak; the thunderstorm dumping it’s fresh rain in milky sheets into the forests above the village and eventually into the cofferdams that will become the islands’ water supply.

A giant, powerful female spirit, surveying her lair from high above there, her hair the moonlit wisps of high-altitude ice crystals streaming downwind from the anvil head of the storm, the fronds of her grass skirt draping her feet in the mountain tops and cleansing her people, as the island myth tells it.

Looking up at this from the inner lagoon, it’s not a far stretch.