Kirk Groehnert
For the past few days, we've been in Tahanea Atoll. This atoll is uninhabited but there are about two shacks we saw here for the locals to come and stay when they are harvesting copra (coconut). Although it is uninhabited, there were several boats here and a few came and went while we were here.
We had a beach barbecue with the other boats which was a lot of fun. Everyone brought something to share and Crystal made a salmon dip which everyone loved.
We also met some friends we met in Nuku Hiva, Wolf and Doris from Austria. What a surprise that was! As we were walking through the trees and shrubbery, we heard some chopping which turned out to be Wolf trying to cut a coconut open. It's a lot of fun to keep bumping into people we met previously.
The favorite thing here for everyone to do was drift snorkel in one of the three passes. We hop into our dingy, and go over to the pass when there is an inbound current. We then jump in the water with snorkeling gear on and holding a line from the dingy. The dingy and us float with the current as it takes us through the pass. We just relax and watch all of the different coral colors and beautiful fish go by. Then we repeat, again and again.
The coral needs needs crystal clear water for sunlight and it also needs the nutrients that in flowing current brings. That's why there is more variety of coral in the passes.
Aside from the snorkeling, we went and ate fresh coconut again. It tastes a lot better from the tree than buying it somewhere. We used our machete that bought in El Salvador.
Then there were some boat repairs we had to do while here - our dinghy popped a seam and we had glue it back and we discovered our ocean port holes (windows) were seeping water. In some areas there was quite a bit water of accumulated so we had to take them all out, clean them up, put new sealant on them and put a new weather seal on them. Fortunately, we had everything to do the job but it took a long time for the sealant to cure.
Now it's time to leave. We are going to one more atoll, one of the more popular ones with some tourism called Fakarava Atoll. It's about 50 miles which could be done during the day but we will do it at night because we need to time our entrance to the atoll. We will enter the atoll around 10 am tomorrow morning.