For any of you that don't know what an atoll is, here is a pretty good description of them: "it's the final stage of a volcanic island that is eroding and combined with coral reefs. It is nothing but a lagoon-encircling reef, in some instances continuous and in others broken up into a series of motus or islets that vary in length from a few hundred yards to tens of miles long, but they rarely exceed 300 to 400 yards in width. Most of the them are visible for only 7-10 miles in clear sunny weather: while in rain cloudy sky or at night visibility can be reduced to 10'or less!!! Coconut palms add another 50-75' feet of height to the surrounding motus. Inside the lagoon is an aquarium of marine life not sustainable in the deep, turbulent open ocean. Tropical fish abound in a rainbow of colors and a fantasy of shapes. Varied coral colonies and sponges grow with the delicate forms and pastel hues. Often threatening coral heads rise to just above or just below the surface of the water while the coral sand bottom reflects the rays of the sun to a jade-green surface." The above was taken from the book "Landfalls of Paradise" by Earl R. Hinz and Jim Howard. It describes an atoll better than I've seen anywhere else. Needless to say, we have to be on watch for the coral heads all the time we are moving around in these lagoons!! So when we travel from one anchorage to another, as we did this morning, in most places one of us (Paulie;>) as Don's navigating) has to be on the bow watching to make sure we don't hit any coral heads. Another worry to navigate around are the Black Pearl Farms with their buoys everywhere! This atoll is known for black pearls and, as we are now anchored in front of Alfreds' (he has a pearl farm and also a small dry storage area) we hope to find out more about black pearls (and maybe 1 or 2 MIGHT land on Storm Haven;>)!! But that's for tomorrow.
We got to the Tuamotu Island and went to an atoll called 'Apataki' and came into the NW entrance called Passe Haniuru May 5, 2011 at around 9:30 am. We had planned to go to an atoll called Ahe, but the tides were really wrong for our arrival there. So we went to Apataki Instead. We still had to wait for 1 ½ hours for the tides to get slack so we could enter into the lagoon. It wasn't quite as bad as we'd anticipated. But we still got down to about 3 knots but were only powered with about 1050 RPMs. So we had a lot more power we could have used had we needed it. But it was very confused seas outside of the entrance and we probably could have waited another 15 to 30 minutes for the slack to get a little calmer. All the tide and current programs we have (3) are a little off and all of our friends say the same thing. As much as I'm not crazy about Nobeltec, their tides and currents were fairly close. We've never had to watch that too much in the Sea of Cortez where we've cruised the past few years and so it's a new learning curve for us. I still can't seem to get the currents to open up and need to work with it a bit, I guess.

Anyway, we moved this morning (5-8-11) to the SE side of the atoll of Apataki as we wanted to see the village of Niutahi. But when we got there our charts were not very clear and coral heads and reefs were everywhere. The channel to go out was clearly marked but we wanted to go into the town and didn't quite know where/ how to get there. We'd decided to turn around and go back to the NW anchorage where we'd had a wonderful last couple of nights with absolutely no waves hitting the bottom of SH all night and calm conditions. We'd pulled some grib files for weather and It said the winds were about to turn and the NW anchorage we were at was open to those winds. But at least we knew it was a good anchorage, even if we did pull a coral head up with our 110 lb bruce anchor when we pulled anchor this morning!! While we were heading out, a small fishing boat came out and told us they would lead us to a great anchorage by their house at a place called motu Totoro. His name is Alfred and his son is Tony. They own a black pearl farm and have a small haul out facility. They are very nice and, tho we haven't met face to face other than from their guiding boat to Storm Haven, we've heard from other friends cruising here that they are extremely gracious folks. We tried to give them a loaf of banana nut bread Paulie made yesterday which they refused. They only wanted to lead us to a great anchorage by their home which was about 9-10 miles from the village of Niutahi. It's beautiful, of course, (as every place we've been is;>) and like pictures from scenes in movies of the S.Pacific. It's a cool 81 degrees with a cool 8-10 kt breeze. We hope to do some diving tomorrow and meet up with Alfred and his family to go on land and maybe take a tour of his place. Well, I'll try to update a little more often (this cruising life is such a busy life:>) and I will also try to get some pictures posted. We might not be able to do that until we find wifi which probably won't be until we get to Rangiroa in a week or so. Anyway, that's it for now. Happy Mothers' Day to all you Mothers' out there!

Paulie, Don & Bootsie too!
(the previous entry was from April 17th)