Taha’a, Society Islands

13. Jul. 2015
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French Polynesia
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3 Comments

Author: Pete

Location: Taha’a, Society Islands

Date: July 9 – 12, 2015

Sailed out of the Fare pass in Huahine and headed west downwind with following seas, running wing-wing to Taha’a….a….ah.. a… ah.. aaaa. Ugly clouds obscured the island as we crossed the twenty easy miles, but thankfully never hammered us. I love weather that’s “All-Bark, No-Bite”, or as my buddy Hal puts it, “All Hat and No Cattle”.

Once through the easy Toahotu pass we cut slightly south and into the deep Haamene Bay. We’re not sure what’s up with the island’s obsession with unnecessary vowels; I bet they’d get along well with Brits when they visit. I’m think they’d love the flavour, colour, and granduure of the island. We picked up a mooring in 100 feet of water courtesy of Hotel Hibiscus who we heard did great tours of the local vanilla and pearl farms on the island. We radiod them to see if they’d show us around the next day, then settled in to enjoy the huge empty bay and clearing skies.

The next day we met up with Marke, whose French father and Polynesian mother ran the pension. In my mind, Marke is spelled like that in following with the unnecessary vowels. You think I’m kidding, but when he showed us around the island, all of the signs seem to be missing all the consonants. Like when we drove through the town of Faaaha. Sounds like something I’ve shouted in front of my students when I forget to move the decimal and end up with completely the wrong answer twenty minutes later. “FAAAHA!”

Our first stop was at a local vanilla farm. Apparently, 80% of the French Polynesian vanilla comes from Taha’a. Teva, our host, showed us his covered grow house that keeps birds and other pests out. He said each vine takes 3 years to mature and give flower. The beans take nine months to develop after the flower is pollinated. Then the beans need to be sun-dried which takes another five months. So it takes over a year to go from flower to sellable bean. One kilogram (2.2 pounds, you lackey) of dried beans though goes for about $400-500 USD.

It’s a hybrid of the Bourbon vanilla from Madagascar, and needs to be pollinated by hand since the insects that normally do the job weren’t brought to the island with the first plants. So our host, Teva, showed us how to pollinate the flowers. It made me blush, but it’s all in the name of science and fine cuisine!

The whole thing was run out of his house with his wife. Sounds like it takes a good deal of time and capital to set up, but then runs pretty smoothly. Teva said he sells mostly to local and foreign restaurants looking for organic, independently grown vanilla. Great niche.

Then it was off to the pearl farm along the winding coastal road. Gorgeous weather and a great view of Bora Bora.

Out on the docks our hostess, Magda, showed Miranda and I the process of making a pearl. The oysters are mostly a breed from the Tuamotus and are now grown here, hung in baskets under floats in the lagoon. Oysters will coat foreign objects in their iridescent mother of pearl. When that happens in nature you get a gorgeous object the size and shape of a Nerdz candy, but certainly not your gramma’s pearl earrings style.

To get that shape the oysters are grown for a couple years until they’re big enough to handle a nucleus, or sphere cut from a swarthy clam from the Mississippi river. So a white marble is put into the oyster, and twelve to eighteen months later the thing is coated to an appropriate thickness with mother of pearl. Seems like cheating, right?

If an oyster spits out the nucleus or coats it only partially, which happens about half the time, the oyster will never be a pearl bearer and is thus is eaten with lemon and garlic. If the oyster coats the nucleus well, which can be discerned through careful, non-destructive surgery, a larger nucleus is inserted and the oyster is returned to the farm. Most productive oysters can make four pearls before they’re tuckered out. Magda showed me all about where to squeeze to get the pearl to pop out. She said I’m pretty good at it, but I’m sure she says that to all the guys. Geeze, here I thought vanilla pollination would be the only thing that made me blush on this excursion.

The next day the good weather held and we were off to the other side of Taha’a. On the northwest side of the island are a couple motus; we anchored just off Ilot Tautau, encrusted with expensive palapa-style bungalows stretching out across the water. They had a really lovely view until we showed up and plunked our anchor just offshore in the eight feet of crystalline water and clear sand. Suckers!

Between Tautau and the next motu north, Mararare, there’s a pass out to the reef that’s 300 feet wide and a quarter mile long. The channel is only three feet at the deepest and it’s a snorkeling gold mine. It’s called the Coral Gardens, but Coral Maze might be more appropriate. The corals are healthy, colorful, and dense. And the fish must be used to getting fed by the tourists because upon entry they swarm you. If you open your hands to them they nip at your empty palms. I lost sight of Miranda a few times behind clouds of Pacific Double Saddle Butterflyfish and Convict Surgeonfish.

Even though we didn’t bring any bread to feed the fish I still think they were happy to see us.

Two days of almost constant immersion and then we were off to Bora Bora, purportedly the most beautiful island in the world!

Passage to Tahiti

04. Jun. 2015
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French Polynesia, Passages
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Author: Pete

Location: 16°54.429S’ 146°57.237W’

Date: June 2nd – June 4th

June 2nd saw the high wind which had previously swept the Tuamotus and filled our kites in the past days calming. It’s time to head to Tahiti. Liza and Felix have flights to catch and Miranda and I have a good deal of work to do on the boat that we’ve been neglecting. It’s been terrific ignoring minor problems in favor of diving and kiting and snorkeling all in the same day. That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it? But the TO-DO list grows longer little by little as the salt air and general wear and tear take their toll on everything. We need a week of civilization, or more specifically, a hardware store. A grocery store wouldn’t hurt either.

Made a couple lunches and a couple dinners to have in the refrigerator so no one had to cook in the two day passage. Said goodbye to our friends on Namaste who we’d been kiting and diving with for the week. We pulled anchor without incident. Our three meter anchorage had low, scattered coral heads and we floated the chain to avoid them. We rounded the long shoal finger just inside of the Fakarava pass and exited easily even with 2 knots of incoming current. Outside the pass we put up the spinnaker and ghosted along slowly for an hour, then doused it and motored, then flew the spinnaker again just at dusk. So much work, this sailing life. Now we’re on the downhill run to Papeete. A little rain accompanied us along the way.

June 3rd, our second day on passage to Tahiti trailed behind us like our wake astern. At the end of my watch the wind died and the spinnaker sagged over the deck. I pulled it down and fired up the girls. We motored most of the day in zero wind. Really ZERO wind. The Pacific was glassy, and besides a few gentile rollers lifting the boat there was nothing but our forward motion courtesy of the diesels. The wind filled in come evening, and just before dinner we were again sailing, now on a beam reach. A cargo ship, the Chiquita according to the AIS, steamed by us off our starboard at 18 knots, coming within a half mile. We haven’t seen a real ship in months!

Liza and Felix caught a tuna and cleaned it for dinner! We put it with rice and veggies and sat on deck watching the sky afterwards. Miranda spent some time digging coral out of her knees from kiteboarding into and through the coral ‘bommies’ in Fakarava. Much easier if you just go over them.

Now it’s another gorgeous, cloudless night sailing under a full moon bright enough to put charge through the solar panels!

Sighted Tahiti the morning of June 4th. The tall green of the island and its massive dimension contrast starkly with the low, tiny motus of the atolls we’ve been frequenting. It’s pretty amazing to think that there were islands like Tahiti on all of those atolls, once tall and green, now ground into sand and swept out to sea as the coral reefs build into low motu and remain. Pretty neat geographical evolution. You can really see the scale of geologic time. Don’t blink.

The wind built steadily throughout the night. This morning I woke to the pleasantly rocky ride associated with good wind. We’re up to 15 knots of wind abeam and are nicely making way, topping out at 8 knots. The boat hums happily with a low vibration when we approach hull speed. Feels good to be moving fast; I’m humming too. Funny how one’s mood is so synced with that of the boat. She’s like another entity among us. Like I need one more female personality aboard! (kidding, kidding!)

Cumulous clouds cap the verdant peaks as we round the north side of the island. Eventually buildings spring into view and other boats bounce along the choppy sea. We prepare for making port. Just before we pass between the (backwards) navigational buoys we called the harbor control and were given clearance to enter the port. Were they going to fire cannons at us if we didn’t call? We sidled up to a finger pier in the new municipal marina that’s still under construction without incident, despite my rusty docking skills. I think we just sailed to Tahiti.

Raroia, Tuamotus

15. May. 2015
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French Polynesia
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2 Comments

Author: Pete

Location: Raroia, Tuamotus

Date: May 11th – 15th, 2015

May 11th: Spent a day around the town on Raroia. It’s an flat, open island with tall palms dropping toddler-sized coconuts and coral-rubble ground. A few streets crisscross the island, which takes about two minutes to walk across and ten minutes to walk the length of. Calling it ‘sleepy’ is an understatement of epic proportions. There’s a store, but it has no sign pointing to it and is in someone’s house on a dirt path off a side road. The locals are friendly, but not as ridiculously welcoming as the Marquesians. They pilot hand made wooden boats with the captain standing a hole in the bow deck, holding a joystick and throttle. They zoom up and down the motu, to where, we don’t know. On the north side of the motu there is a small pearl farm with Chinese workers who tend the myriad oyster cylinders, floated with white and red buoys.

May 12: This morning was a treat. After breakfast of blueberry scones and papaya we took the dinghy back to the pass north of our anchorage and out towards the deep, open blue. We arrived purposefully just before slack water at high tide, so the current in the pass was still flowing into the lagoon. We motored to the outside of the pass in 10 feet of water, just before the knee-quivering, courage-shattering, drop off to two-thousand feet and splashed in.

The visibility took your breath away and there was a collective gasp at the undulating coral, stretching as far as the eye could see. It almost gave me vertigo, the water was so clear, I felt like I should be falling. The current whisked us briskly back toward the lagoon. We screamed along, floating along side the dinghy. Someone each pass was in charge of holding on to the painter (bow line on dinghies). The others swooped along the bottom, arms out… it really was about as close to flight as it gets without an airplane, even coming from a couple of years of paragliding in Chile.

There were fish of all shapes and sizes. The swarthy Red Snapper, and the painted Emperor Triggerfish were highlights, but there were thousands and thousands of fish. It was incredible. Along with the fish there were sharks. Dozens of sharks. They were harmless and not too big, mostly Black and White Tip Reef Sharks. They cruised along with us, not coming too close. Maybe we’re getting desensitized to them. Or the lack of oxygen from the free diving is getting to our brains.

We must have made 8 or 9 laps, floating in, motoring out, each pass getting progressively slower, until we were at slack tide and the water was still. It only took about five minutes and the current reversed and started pulling us out to the deep blue. We headed back to Tayrona.

In the afternoon we pulled anchor and motored upwind to the pass, then turned east to cross the lagoon. There problem with these lagoons is they’re not surveyed, so we’re going in blind, but there’s a reward on the other side. The site where Thor Heyerdahl landed with the raft Kon-Tiki in 1947 proving it was possible for South American Incans to have settled French Polynesia. There’s a great movie recently made about it called Kon-Tiki about his 101 day float from Peru. Watch it! The sun was at our back and it was easy to dodge the coral heads rising up from 100 feet to just ankle-deep at the surface. They showed up pale yellow and green spots amidst the expanse of azure. We anchored off the Kon-Tiki island, the sun lighting up the sand and coral bottom. Speared two Camouflage Groupers in the afternoon and had them grilling by sunset.

Now I’m writing on the trampoline in the absolute flat of the lagoon. The roar of the sea breaking on the reef a few hundred yards east of us is soothing and alarming at the same time. The stars and Mikly Way are the only lights, even across the pond. I love being this far out… I love it.

May 13: Spent the day jumping off the boat and snorkeling on the coral heads around the anchorage. The two boats from the Raroia anchorage came over and we made a bonfire on the tiny islet, facing the crashing reef. We cooked foil packets of potato, onions, carrots, and sausage right on the coals, then played guitar and harmonica into the night. Okay, until 9:00, but that’s really late for cruisers.

May 14: Moved a few islets north today, only about 4 miles to check out a great spit of land with one single palm tree on it. Reminded me of Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons. More snorkeling. More sharks. This place is full of them! In the afternoon I walked around one of the un-named islands. The palm trees give way to coral rubble that extends towards the open sea. The water is calf-deep, and punctuated by coral boulders.

I walked out into the shallow water, watching the dark blue sea heave wave after wave upon the coral reef, some 200 meters out from the islet. I was almost out to the reef when a fast moving form came scooting in towards my feet, a black-tipped fin cutting the twelve inches of water. I hollered and jumped bravely onto one of the coral boulders, like a 1940’s housewife balking at a mouse. In my defense, this mouse was a black tip reef shark. And he wasn’t alone. Four little sharks, between two and three feet long, circled my little rock, attracted by the splashing sounds of my shoes in the water. They were almost cute, being so small, aside from the fact that they were SHARKS. The “duh-DUMP” music from Jaws played in my head as their fins weaved around. I threw a few stones at them, and they spooked and took off, but didn’t go too far. I dawned on me that I was playing the age-old kid’s game, Hot Lava, where you can stand on certain locations, but in between you’ll be melted, or in this case, eaten by tiny sharks. Fun! I courageously bounced from boulder to boulder, standing like a meerkat on each one looking for predators. I did make it out to the reef eventually. It’s incredible, the reef is bright Peptobisthmol pink and is pretty much level with the surface of the water, but drop off like a cliff into deep deep blue sea. The waves pummel the reef, and the energy is absorbed and the water returned to the sea through narrow, evenly spaced channels. Really neat. I played the Hot Lava game back to the island. Despite the sharkies the area was so neat I brought the rest of the crew back later to check it out.