Cooks Bay
20 June 2014 | 17 30.24'S:149 49.30'W, Moorea
Colin
After seeing Tori off we cleaned up the boat, ran down our clearance papers and pulled out of Marina Taina headed for Moorea. We'd been in Tahiti 3 weeks and had accomplished a lot. The 17 mile passage to Cooks bay was pretty uneventful as the winds were mostly light and we motorsailed the whole way. Still, it felt good to be back underway. Cooks Bay is a long, deep inlet surrounded by jagged mountains that were once the rim of a volcano. Quite beautiful. While many boats anchored behind the reef next to the mouth of the bay, we went all the way in and anchored in about 50 ft, near the head of the bay. The next day we had torrential rain and gusty catabotic winds that blew 30 kts from every direction. It was an odd sensation feeling the boat dance around on the shifty winds, never really getting lined up in one direction. Still, we were glad to be up inside the bay with good holding and plenty of room. We spent the day reading, playing games and watching movies. We did catch quite a bit of rainwater off the bimini for the laundry and washing the boat - How green is that? The next day was clear and gorgeous, so while the solar panels were making back our movie deficit, we went ashore and hiked the town enjoying the sights and a pretty good pizza. That afternoon we set out for a neighboring bay called Opunohu Bay, which is apparently the actual landing spot of Captain Cook. This is also the location where much of the movie "Bounty" (Mel Gibson/Anthony Hopkins) was filmed.