THE ‘PACIFIC ISLAND’ SCENERY THAT WE ALL IMAGINE?

Saturday 13th October: After three months in the rolly, swell-effected anchorages of the Marquesas it felt quite strange being inside the sheltered lagoon of Kuaehi’s reef last night, we’re not likely to need a second/stern anchor whilst we’re in the Tuamotus, though as with all things, there is a trade-off. The surrounding reefs might check the ocean swells, but with nothing taller than a palm tree, the wind fairly whistles through irrespective of its direction and a to us ‘new’ problem is dealing with ‘coral bommies’. The water in the anchorage off Tearavero is around 40’ deep, over acres of white sand, but sadly it’s liberally scattered with isolated ‘towers’ of live coral, obviously those that rise to 39’, or even 30’above the seabed need to be avoided completely, but even those that’re only a few feet high can cause you problems. If – let’s be realistic - when - the boat moves due to a change of wind direction or tide/current it’s very easy to wrap the anchor chain around one or more of these bommies and then you have the task of untangling it before you can raise the anchor again; we don’t carry scuba gear and nowadays I struggle to snorkel down to much below 30’.
In this first instance we anchored well offshore as the seemed to be fewer bommies a half-mile out and then we buoyed the bulk of the anchor chain using fenders and empty plastic water cans (whatever came to hand) so that it hopefully ‘floats’ above any or at least most of the bommies within Moon Rebel’s swinging circle. Our first attempt at this new skill certainly wasn’t helped by the fact that it was cloudy, overcast and windy day when we were trying to anchor, so we struggled to see where the bommies were through the water. The anchor felt to dig/bite securely and we’re not hearing the tell-tale sound of chain scraping across rock/coral, so we’re hopeful that it’ll come up cleanly when we come to leave?
Friday and Saturday were both damp & squally days – glad we’re not still at sea – so we spent them eating, sleeping and recovering from our six-day passage and it wasn’t until Sunday that we ventured ashore. Sunday’s probably not the best day to judge an isolated spot like Kauehi, but it appeared as if a good proportion of the population had left Tearavero and taken the town’s only horse with them. We knew from speaking to people in the Marquesas that the copra (dried coconut) industry was dying fast, with France no longer able, or perhaps willing to underpin the market price and beyond a couple of very tired looking breadfruit trees, coconut palms were about the only things growing ashore. Kauehi did apparently have a thriving pearl-farming industry, but that too has collapsed, our French-language skills weren’t up to discovering exactly why, but it sounded to be a problem with the lagoon’s water? Whilst wandering around noticed several areas with a strong sulphurous smell – a couple with the water bubbling – and wondered if the underlying volcano had perhaps become more active and thereby effecting the water quality?
From our point of view, the dearth of pearl farms and resultant heaps of redundant pearl farming equipment ashore made the task of obtaining some pearl-farm buoys easy: They’re rigid plastic balls, about 16” in diameter and the favoured yachty’s method for floating our anchor chains above/over the coral bommies. After years of discussing the importance that chain-weight, sea-bed friction and catenary effect hold in keeping a yacht securely anchored, it seems counter-intuitive to now be suspending the chain’s scope on floats? We bought four floats for $10, though I suspect we might well have got them for half that price or even free – there were dozens, sometimes hundreds heaped-up beside every other house – but we felt the local community probably needed the $10 more than we did. I know it was Sunday, but we didn’t see more than 15-20 people, perhaps a third of the village’s (though Kauehi ‘City’ signs are prevalent) houses looked empty/semi-derelict and absolutely everything, including the church was closed. The only people we saw doing anything constructive were three guys who were drying what we discovered were sea-slugs, that they catch, dry and sell; we presumed these were ultimately being exported to the Far East, though the fishermen didn’t appear to know themselves, other than they “send them to Tahiti” and that they didn’t eat that ‘merde’ themselves.
Monday 15th October: We never thought about that! Having come to Kauehi, our next destination is the Atoll of Fakarava and depending which end of it we go to (it has north and south reef passes) it’s either 35 or 40 miles from here, both distances are too far to make in the six hour time slot between ‘slack water’ at the reef passes and with the times that these short periods of slack water are falling just now, there’s no twelve hour slot that’ll be in daylight at either end too – today they’re at approximately 0315/0930/1545/2200 – so it’s either traverse one pass in the dark, or one pass with the tide ‘wrong’ or spin the trip out over eighteen hours. Given our experience with Pacific winds we chose option three and it proved correct, we left Tearavera at 13:10 with just a scrap of headsail out, drifted through Kauehi’s pass on the last of the ebb tide at 15:30 and sailed quietly through the night and arrived at Fakarava south pass at 08:00 the following morning; slow, but no risks, hassles or concerns and by soon after 09:00 we were picking-up one of the free and we’re assured well maintained mooring balls, we don’t even need to deploy our newly acquired pearl-farm buoys.
16-22nd October: We were welcomed into Fakarava by ‘Kokopelli’ Brian blowing his conch-horn as we motored up to the buoy, then coming across by dinghy to deliver a few ice-cold beers; it was only 09:30, but as they were the first we’d seen in about ten days it’d have been rude not to quaff a couple at least. We spent almost a week off Tetamanu – I think that’s what the village there’s called. Though perhaps even ‘village’ is stretching things a bit for a couple of bar/restaurants and a half-dozen beach-chalets catering to the scuba divers; it may not have a horse, but it does have a pick-up truck, which seemed a bit of overkill for an island that’s less than ¼ mile square.
We made progress on a couple of boat jobs- perhaps not a much/many as we should have? – I did a lot of snorkeling and even went scuba diving for the first time in about fifteen years and we wandered around the Tetamanu and several other small motus in the area. I thought Lesley summed it up accurately with: “Just like the San Blas Islands, but without all the rubbish”. The snorkeling and diving was pristine/spectacular too, though whilst the reef pass here is apparently considered one of the top places in the world to scuba dive, I actually enjoyed exploring the area of coral bommies just adjacent to the yacht moorings far more – the sharks were bigger there too!
Tetamanu was also a bit of a low-point for us too, as that’s where we waved a final goodbye to Brian & Mizzy on ‘Kokopelli’: We first met them in St Martin almost two years ago and have been taking a similar routes (not always intentionally) crossing tracks and partying with each other from time to time ever since. As we continue west, they’ve turned north for Hawaii and it may be long while before our wakes cross again? A major downside of ocean cruising is you’re too often saying goodbye to lifelong friends that you’ve met along the way.
23rd – 30th October: With the Kokos heading east where they’ll hopefully meet ‘Spirit of Argo’ as we’ve just heard that Cain & April are finally heading this way from the Marquesa Islands and both are bound initially for Raroia, the island upon which the ‘Kon-tiki’ raft made its first landfall in Polynesia. We’re also hopeful that they’ll both do better than Thor Heyerdahl, who didn’t so much ‘arrive’ on the Kon-tiki as crash it onto the reef. Oh how accepted science changes: We all grew up learning how the Heyerdahl expedition proved that the South Pacific Islands were first populated by people sailing across from South America on balsa wood rafts, whereas now DNA testing proves that the Polynesians originated in southern China and sailed the opposite way completely.
We dropped our own mooring lines and quietly sailed twenty miles up inside the reef to Pakokota, a ‘village’ which made Tetamanu look like a huge metropolis, but which did (just) offer the first real internet connection since we left Ua Pou, We spent a couple of days there snorkelling, finally getting the last of the greenery/growth from our Pacific crossing off Moon rebel’s waterline and seeing what we’d been missing in the real world, before another gentle/light winds half-day sail up to Rotoava, the major population centre of Fakarava. The passage was completed without benefit of our jib sail as when we tried unrolling it the Facnor roller-reefing unit was playing-up once; stripped that once we reached Rotoava – not more broken circlips for a change, but a jam between the halyard shackle and the inner bearing sleeve; the same shackle that’s been on there for years, why a problem now?
Our light winds sail was a taste of things to come. We’ve not seen a lot of wind ever since we got to the Pacific, but the first week in Rotoava there was none at all and being inside the cordon of the reef, the seas were glass flat too; we’ve not had anchoring conditions like these since we left the Mediterranean Sea. More interneting, a full overhaul of the bilge pumps and I’ve also started removing the second half of the tired/UV damaged ‘Treadmaster’ non-slip coating from Moon Rebel’s deck – I did the worst/first half in Greece back in 2012 and it’s taken until now to recover from what’s a slow, exhausting and blister-inducing job. I have learnt from that experience though and this time around it’ll be ‘no more than an hour a day’, so it’ll probably take me six weeks to finish it, but at least I won’t suffer from sore/shredded fingers for months afterwards!