Text and Photo by Liz Clark



There is MUCH more energy on the reef this morning. Its thunder is like a constant itch. I can't focus. I'm scared again. I want to go, but I don't. I want to catch a big one, but I don't. The jet skis buzz by and a flash orange boat loads up across the way with a French pro and his photog posse. I'm scared. I go inside. Lay down on the settee bench...take a few deep breaths...I'm up again. Eat a banana. Put on some sunscreen. Lay back down. Close my eyes. Open them. Sit up. Shuffle through some bikinis. Gather more stuff than I would need for a two week surf trip and finally make my way over to the circus that's gathered at Teahupoo*. Teahupoo* is doing what it does in the pictures today. It's big, it's barreling, it's beautiful, and I'm, yes, scared. There's a crowd of maybe 15, not all THAT bad, and I sit a while and watch the guys take off from way inside, boldly set the rail, and slingshot through the perfect water vortex. They make it look SO easy.

I paddle out. I'm scared. I hang at the edge. I realize the crowd factor is tricky. No pressure, I tell myself. I wait. It's perfectly glassy. I drift up the line-up and then paddle back down. And wait. And watch. The boys paddle around me like I don't exist, but my uncertainty is visible.

Raimana, the king Tahitian waterman, stands outside on his stand-up paddleboard--calm and content and poised--as he strokes easily into a thick set at the west bowl...I hold my breath beholding his steep drop just in front of the explosion of whitewater...but there's no need, I can tell it's like a Sunday stroll in the park for him. He paddles back up, calling the sets and running the line-up like an auctioneer. I wait and watch. He's brought a 13-year old local charger, Keoni, today. Observing his every order to Keoni, I watch his tight adherence to Raimana's words...the trust between them is clear. I catch a small one and paddle quickly over to the shoulder. Raimana calls Keoni into another west one. But this time there are two and I am left alone with the second...the others are too deep.

Raimana has seen me surf before. I introduced myself at the pass a few miles down. He's seen me waiting here, but I'm not sure if he's sure that I'm sure if I actually really WANT one of these waves. But suddenly I really DO. I'm NOT scared. The wave is all mine if I want it...

"Go Liz! GO!!!!!! Paddle in!!!!!!! TO THE REEF!! To the reef!!!!! Gooooooooooooo!" I paddle with everything I have, just barely getting under it. It curdles up under me, thick and bottoming out. I'm late but here we go! I don't even think...anymore as my body switches over to muscle memory. I am air dropping with my rail in hand. There' water in my eyes and a lot of foam but I somehow recover from the drop, momentarily hear the foam ball, and go rocketing out the other side. I survived! And who could guess what I want now...MORE!

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Liz Clark sails solo around the world on her 40-foot sailboat, Swell, in search of people, places and waves. She sends us travel updates, stories and photos several times a week.

More travel logs

More photos of the trip

Text and Photo by Liz Clark



There is MUCH more energy on the reef this morning. Its thunder is like a constant itch. I can't focus. I'm scared again. I want to go, but I don't. I want to catch a big one, but I don't. The jet skis buzz by and a flash orange boat loads up across the way with a French pro and his photog posse. I'm scared. I go inside. Lay down on the settee bench...take a few deep breaths...I'm up again. Eat a banana. Put on some sunscreen. Lay back down. Close my eyes. Open them. Sit up. Shuffle through some bikinis. Gather more stuff than I would need for a two week surf trip and finally make my way over to the circus that's gathered at Teahupoo*. Teahupoo* is doing what it does in the pictures today. It's big, it's barreling, it's beautiful, and I'm, yes, scared. There's a crowd of maybe 15, not all THAT bad, and I sit a while and watch the guys take off from way inside, boldly set the rail, and slingshot through the perfect water vortex. They make it look SO easy.

I paddle out. I'm scared. I hang at the edge. I realize the crowd factor is tricky. No pressure, I tell myself. I wait. It's perfectly glassy. I drift up the line-up and then paddle back down. And wait. And watch. The boys paddle around me like I don't exist, but my uncertainty is visible.

Raimana, the king Tahitian waterman, stands outside on his stand-up paddleboard--calm and content and poised--as he strokes easily into a thick set at the west bowl...I hold my breath beholding his steep drop just in front of the explosion of whitewater...but there's no need, I can tell it's like a Sunday stroll in the park for him. He paddles back up, calling the sets and running the line-up like an auctioneer. I wait and watch. He's brought a 13-year old local charger, Keoni, today. Observing his every order to Keoni, I watch his tight adherence to Raimana's words...the trust between them is clear. I catch a small one and paddle quickly over to the shoulder. Raimana calls Keoni into another west one. But this time there are two and I am left alone with the second...the others are too deep.

Raimana has seen me surf before. I introduced myself at the pass a few miles down. He's seen me waiting here, but I'm not sure if he's sure that I'm sure if I actually really WANT one of these waves. But suddenly I really DO. I'm NOT scared. The wave is all mine if I want it...

"Go Liz! GO!!!!!! Paddle in!!!!!!! TO THE REEF!! To the reef!!!!! Gooooooooooooo!" I paddle with everything I have, just barely getting under it. It curdles up under me, thick and bottoming out. I'm late but here we go! I don't even think...anymore as my body switches over to muscle memory. I am air dropping with my rail in hand. There' water in my eyes and a lot of foam but I somehow recover from the drop, momentarily hear the foam ball, and go rocketing out the other side. I survived! And who could guess what I want now...MORE!

---

Liz Clark sails solo around the world on her 40-foot sailboat, Swell, in search of people, places and waves. She sends us travel updates, stories and photos several times a week.

More travel logs

More photos of the trip

Text and Photo by Liz Clark



The thundering sound on the reef made it impossible to sleep. I tossed and turned, fearing the fear I already knew I would feel during my first session. After all, it was Teahupoo*! In my mind, it was so thick and punishing and frightening and reef-y and everything scary about a wave except for 'cold' that I could ever imagine...in a daze of dawn, I half-reluctantly pulled out my sweet new J7 6'4" and piled over the side into the Ripple. I waved to my fishermen buddies as I putted off across the lagoon, talking myself through a strategy and nibbling nervously at my last Cliff bar.

My friend, Josh Humbert, who I'd met the year prior in the Tuamoutus, was all psyched and set to take photos, while I wasn't even sure I was capable of actually surfing!? I dawdled in the channel, scoping out the sets and the crowd's dynamic. The cloud cover gave it a gray, angry look, as the heaving lips sucked up and arced into cavernous water cylinders. But after a thorough surveillance, the sets looked manageable-a foot overhead at most. I spotted a few familiar faces, too, so I went over and tied to the buoy in the channel, did my routine surf prep, and paddled for the lineup.

After greeting Adam, who I hadn't seen since my one time there a year before, and Fabrice who I surfed with routinely near the boatyard, I sat wide for a while to get comfortable with a place to line-up with on land and just observe the behavior of the wave. Finally Adam called, "This one, Liz, GO!!" I paddled hard and got under it, grabbed my rail, and locked into backside three-wheel drive, bracing myself for disaster... but to my surprise, I made the drop, glided just under the quickly peeling lip, then saw an exit and launched out the back. "Okay"...I told myself (yes, I realize I have been talking to myself quite a bit lately)... "that wasn't so bad?"

I caught a few more...

Soon the fear had been extremely diffused and I paddled happily chatted myself across the line-up during a long lull...'iaroana's' and 'hi's' and 'bonjours' all around...I felt relieved to think that maybe I could actually surf Teahupoo*!! Yeah yeah yeah!...Hello! Nice to meet you...Ca va? Me? Oh I'm from California...yeah, no, not really on vacation...I'm here on a sailboat..." My words trailed off...

"Liz!" Fabrice called from across a row of five guys... "You have a 'pechu'!... 'caca nez'! He signaled to me with a smile, putting a finger to his nose, as he only knew the word for 'booger' in Tahitian and French...

After wiping a long white blob of snot from my upper lip onto my hand, I burst into a slightly embarrassed laughter. No one else had bothered to tell me!...In that moment and during my many sessions since, I've learned NEVER to let my guard down at this wave...one way or another, Teahupoo* will find a way to humble you.

*In an effort to support Josh Humbert's crusade to correct the outside world's pronunciation of 'Teahupoo', I would like to inform everyone that contrary to popular belief, there is no 'poo' in the pronunciation of Teahupo'o. The 'Teahu' sounds like 'ch-oh' and the po'o like Po' as in Edgar Allen 'Poe'. It's not 'poo'...can't you see there is a glotteral stop!?

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Liz Clark sails solo around the world on her 40-foot sailboat, Swell, in search of people, places and waves. She sends us travel updates, stories and photos several times a week.

More travel logs

More photos of the trip

Text and Photo by Liz Clark



The next morning the engine rumbled beneath my feet as Swell and I made our way slowly south through the lagoon between the green and red markers. It was time...there was swell on the way and after almost a year of surfing Polynesia's reef passes, the moment had come to test my skills at Tahiti's most famous wave: Teahupo'o. From the zillion photos I'd seen, a part of me wanted nothing to do with this wave's disturbingly thick lip and ledge-y take-off...but that OTHER part of me...that slightly insane part couldn't sail away without at least an attempt. I'd heard there was a free little marina, just a half-mile from the Teahupoo pass...and even if it got too big to surf, it would just be a spectacle to witness...I told myself.

I saw two masts in the marina as I came around the next point. A man in a single outrigger canoe with a surfboard across its front guided me into around the coral heads of the shallow entrance. I appeared to be making him very nervous as I drifted a few feet from the coral head, hopping from the wheel to the bow to tie on a dock line and then back to the wheel and then mid-ship to throw on a bumper. I spun Swell 180 degrees and we nudged silently up into our premiere Teahupoo parking spot. The fishermen across the marina stared. A crowd of girls gathered at the end of the dock stared. I waved. They waved. The fishermen raised their beers. The girls went back to gabbing. It was Saturday afternoon in the quiet little town at the end of the road. Swell and I had found ourselves a new home...

I hopped on my bike and peddled around to introduce myself to the local crew. The two other sailboats looked as if they hadn't moved in decades, but the opposite side of the marina hosted a flash line-up of poti marara and other local fishing boats. A group of salty old Tahitian fishermen gathered near the ice house, seated on crates and car hoods and a rusty wheeled trolley.

"Iaorana!" I offered, skidding to a halt with my bare feet as brakes (my current bike has no brakes and I'd forgotten my flip flops). For a moment they were silent and I felt a wave of shyness coming until...

"Iaorana...eaha huru?!" The biggest one asked.

"Maitai!" I replied. "e oe?"

Amused by my effort to speak Tahitian, the conversation water-falled into who the heck am I and are you really alone? And how long will you be here? And do I want a beer? Need any ice? Some fish too? Be careful on the street and lock up your boat...The kids around here steal! and on and on...I shared a beer with the white-haired one while they smiled and laughed and told me the story of the 4-meter tiger shark they'd mistakenly caught just a few weeks before...And after twenty minutes, I had eight new Tahitian fathers watching out for me (and Swell)...and with a smile, a big "Maruru! (thank you)" and "Ananahei! (see you tomorrow)" I peddled off down the road to check out my new stomping grounds.

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Liz Clark sails solo around the world on her 40-foot sailboat, Swell, in search of people, places and waves. She sends us travel updates, stories and photos several times a week.

More travel logs

More photos of the trip

Text and Photo by Liz Clark

Text and Photo by Harvard University

Text and Photo by Liz Clark

And so I decided to have a look around the parts of Tahiti I had yet to explore with Swell now floating. As usual, I knew exactly where the waves were, but the chart book wasn't all that clear about the anchorages. I made circles around the deep, unfamiliar bay until I spotted some yellow buoys.

"Oh perfect!" I thought. "These must be for some big boats...well...they aren't here right now so I'm sure it's okay if I just tie up to them until I launch the dinghy and scope out a good place to drop the anchor."

Of course I lingered lazily on the buoy, still exhausted from stint with Bali...until on Sunday, when a friend of Eric's (my surf guardian angel from the week before, who also plugged me into his circle of friends here in this area), came by on his way to drop some surfers at the pass...

"Did you know you are tied to a pearl line?" He asked (in French). "You better get off that thing before the workers arrive tomorrow morning! I have a mooring jut over there across the bay in front of my house. I used to have a big catamaran tied to it. You're welcome to tie up there if you want. This bay is very deep and anchoring around here can be tricky."

I looked around at the yellow buoys...all of a sudden I felt like a total idiot...OF COURSE they were pearl lines! And so I came to know Mr. George Riou...

George didn't seem to hold it against me that I couldn't distinguish a boat mooring from a pearl string. He welcomed me onto his mooring and into his petite paradise by the sea. When I set foot on his waterfront property, I knew we were going to get along just fine...the place reeked with fun and creativity and hard work. Judging solely on the amount of aquatic toys gathered in the yard, all of which looked perfectly functional, I could instantly appreciate the quantity of maintenance that when on around here...it was OVERFLOWING with boats of all size. There was a fancy aluminum dive/surf boat, a poti marara Tahitian style fishing boat and a shiny new jet ski hanging side by side on lifting slings, a long-lined open panga-style boat sitting in the driveway, along with another small tinny with an outboard on the boat launch. There was a lovely green lawn with chairs and lounges. Hammocks and swings dangled from the limbs of trees...and oh, look up?! There's a tree house! A guest bungalow right over the water, an outside shower decorated with shells, a picnic table, a sideyard shed full of surfboards, a garage littered with tools and workspace, an artist's corner spackled with enough paint residue to have seen years of projects. Shells and sea souvenirs decorated every corner. There was also an outrigger, a few kayaks, and to top it all off...under a custom built cover there was, well...it looked exact like my inflatable dinghy, but it had a hang gliding wing connected to it with a giant propeller on the back...a FLYING dinghy!!!!! I kid you not, there is a dinghy that flies.

"Now, I seen a horse fly... I seen a dragon fly...and I seen a house fly...I seen a peanut stand, I heard a rubber band, I seen a needle that winked it's eye...but I be done seen 'bout everything when I see a dinghy fly!"

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Liz Clark sails solo around the world on her 40-foot sailboat, Swell, in search of people, places and waves. She sends us travel updates, stories and photos several times a week.

More travel logs

More photos of the trip

Text by Harvard University, Graphic by NSF

A reservoir of briny liquid buried deep beneath an Antarctic glacier supports hardy microbes that have lived in isolation for millions of years, researchers report April 17 in the journal Science.

The discovery of life in a place where cold, darkness, and lack of oxygen would previously have led scientists to believe nothing could survive comes from a team led by researchers at Harvard University and Dartmouth College. Their work was funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA, and Harvard's Microbial Sciences Initiative.

Despite their profound isolation, the microbes are remarkably similar to species found in modern marine environments, suggesting that the organisms now under the glacier are the remnants of a larger population that once occupied an open fjord or sea.

"It's a bit like finding a forest that nobody has seen for 1.5 million years," says Ann Pearson, Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "Intriguingly, the species living there are similar to contemporary organisms, and yet quite different -- a result, no doubt, of having lived in such an inhospitable environment for so long."

"This briny pond is a unique sort of time capsule from a period in Earth's history," says lead author Jill Mikucki, now a research associate in the Department of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth and visiting fellow at Dartmouth's Dickey Center for International Understanding and its Institute of Arctic Studies. "I don't know of any other environment quite like this on Earth."

Chemical analysis of effluent from the inaccessible subglacial pool suggests that its inhabitants have eked out a living by breathing iron leached from bedrock with the help of a sulfur catalyst. Lacking any light to support photosynthesis, the microbes have presumably survived by feeding on the organic matter trapped with them when the massive Taylor Glacier sealed off their habitat an estimated 1.5 to 2 million years ago.

Mikucki, Pearson, and colleagues based their analysis on samples taken at Antarctica's Blood Falls, a frozen waterfall-like feature at the edge of the Taylor Glacier whose striking red appearance first drew early explorers' attention in 1911. Those "Heroic Age" adventurers speculated that red algae might have been responsible for the bright color, but scientists later confirmed that the coloration was due to rust, which the new research shows was likely liberated from subglacial bedrock by microorganisms.

Because water flows unpredictably from below the glacier at Blood Falls, it took Mikucki a number of years to obtain the samples needed to conduct an analysis. Finally, in the right place at the right time, she was able to capture some of the subglacial brine as it flowed out of a crack in the glacial wall, obtaining a sample of an extremely salty, cold, and clear liquid for analysis.

"When I started running the chemical analysis on it, there was no oxygen," she says. "That was when this got really interesting. It was a real 'Eureka!' moment."

The fluid is rich in sulfur, a geochemical signature of marine environments, reinforcing suspicions that the ancestors of the microbes now beneath the Taylor Glacier probably lived in an ocean long ago. When sea level fell more than 1.5 million years ago, they hypothesize, a pool of seawater was likely trapped and eventually capped by the advancing glacier.

The exact size of the subglacial pool remains a mystery, but it is thought to rest under 400 meters of ice some four kilometers from its tiny outlet at Blood Falls.

Mikucki's analysis showed that the sulfur below the glacier had been uniquely reworked by microbes and provides insight into how these organisms have been able to survive in isolation for so long.

The research answers some questions while raising others about the persistence of life in such extreme environments. Life below the Taylor Glacier may help address questions about "Snowball Earth," the period of geological time when large ice sheets covered Earth's surface. But it could also be a rich laboratory for studying life in other hostile environments, and perhaps even on Mars and or Jupiter's ice-covered moon, Europa.

Text and Photo by The American Chemical Society

Text and Photo by Liz Clark