His mother sits patiently on the dock waiting for him to take a big parrotfish for their dinner. Bruno laughs too, strips down, and dives for his phone. FUUUUCCCKKK!!!! The school kids gather around, laughing. Docked, he shouts to the nearby sandwich joint for a “fishwich and a Coke.” And then drops his cell phone into the drink. A fat man in a torn blue t-shirt and a shock of windblown black hair, he motors back and forth to Tiputa in his 10-foot-long taxi boat, often empty, trolling simultaneously for clients and fish.
He is younger and thus his life-story, via tattoos, is a work-in-progress.īruno commands the second taxi. Astride the bow, guiding him among the corals and jumping dolphins, rides a dread locked man in matching uniform. Diminutive and bow-legged, graying ponytail pulled back, he wears surfer shorts and a yellow slicker to keep the salt-spray off during his dozen roundtrips between motus each morning and afternoon, delivering school kids by community cigarette boat.
They tell the story of his life, and his family’s. One taxi-man, sixty-something, is covered head-to-toe and all parts in between - everything but his tongue - by tattoos. Pair of taxi-boats works the dock at Avatoru, where we slip our kayaks into the northern rim of Rangiroa’s 50-x-20-mile lagoon. The struggle lasts 30 seconds before the shark opens its mouth – wide, exposing a long line of fine, sharp teeth – lets go and swims off.įlicking pieces of bait off his forehead with a giant finger, Ugo grins, his smile as wide as the shark’s mouth. Baiting a 50-pound baby black-tip with a fish head tied to a plasticized line he pulls it, thrashing, into the air. From the back of the “Oviri” Ugo continues to play. His punishment? Live, and live off the sea, on this beautiful spit of coral-and-sand-and-rubble here in the dead center of the South Pacific. Two years into his scam – complete with phonied “reports” from school – the gig was up. he discovered Half Moon Bay, bought a board and made surfer friends. “Go to UC-Berkeley, get an education, learn English,” was his directive. Ugo, 36, speaks good surfer’s English because half his life ago his father handed him a check for $30,000 and a plane ticket to San Francisco. He has three boats and a simple beachside house on the lagoon of Rangiroa, the world’s second-largest coral reef atoll and the best known of the 78-atoll Tuamotu chain north of Tahiti. “Lemons! Big ones! WELCOME, MY FRIEND, TO SHARK CITY!” “Look, down there,” shouts Ugo when we surface. When I open my eyes, four-feet below the sun-sparkled surface, there are literally hundreds of big sharks circling. He is so positive – so convincing that there is nothing to worry about, being inches from the snapping choppers of eight-foot long, 400-pound sharks even as he continues to toss them bloody fish parts, despite that he’s missing part of a thumb for having gotten “lazy” during one such feeding – that I follow. “They’re waiting for us,” he shouts as he jumps smack into the midst of the swarm. With hands like catcher’s mitts Ugo pulls off his clear plastic sandals, replaces them with swim fins, and reaches for his mask and snorkel. With each handful of chum come more carcharinus melanopterus - black-tip sharks – two dozen, three dozen, 50, 100, 200, so thick it’s impossible to count them, to separate them, for all their swarming and churning just below the surface. “The heads, that’s what they like best.” A gentle big-man, smelling of gasoline and sunblock, his solid, sun-browned body quakes with excitement as he dips his hands repeatedly into the white plastic bucket of fish-parts resting on the back of his 40-foot cutter “Oviri” – Tahitian for “Wild” – bobbing in rough seas. ’mon friends, follow me, c’mon, meet my pets,” Ugo shouts, tossing another chunk of bloody bonito into the quintessentially-cobalt South Pacific.