It was hard work getting here but the payoff is astonishing. We are tucked into the NE corner of the Rarioa Atoll (red arrow on chart). We can hear the Pacific Ocean crashing on the outside of the reef but in here the turquoise water in perfectly flat (a real luxury at this point), the palm trees are swaying gently and it looks and feels like the epitomal South Pacific scene. The temperature is just about perfect, the humidity is low, the sky is mainly blue and there really is nothing you would want to change.

Getting into the atoll was interesting. It is a coral ring, about 40km long and 12km wide. It has a tide of 1m and only one significant pass. This means that about 450 million cubic meters or 119 billion gallons of water rush through that pass four times a day so timing was important. We arrived well before the calculated slack tide and monitored the pass. It was not too hard to see the flow. Even with wind with tide there was a remarkable tidal rip where the outflow hit the Pacific swells so we hung about and watched as it gradually settled down. A mother humpback whale and her calf and a small pod of dolphins entertained us while we waited. Eventually we started nosing into the flow to check the current. The north side of the pass was reasonably flat and we only saw a couple of knots so we pushed on through. The max current we saw was 3.5kts which was easily managed and we were through our first atoll pass.

Once inside we had very precise waypoints provided by our friends on Capel Mara, already waiting for us at the anchorage. We used those, geo-referenced Google Earth images and mark 1 eyeballs to navigate through the many coral outcrops or bommies between us and our destination in the NE corner of the atoll. There we met up with our sailing buddies (and waypoint providers) Sal and John on Capel Mara and Leanne and David on Perigee, the main culprits who helped us talk ourselves into this crazy endeavor a couple of years ago and many miles away in Lagoonies bar in Sint Maarten.

Since then life has been slow and easy. The boat was a tip after two passages so we are still working on that and we have the inevitable list of boat chores but we work for a few hours each morning the either go snorkeling, walking on the Motu (area of reef that has built up enough to support vegetation) or hanging about in the shallows chatting. The marine life is always entertaining. If you look at the bottom left corner of the bottom right image that smudge is a 3ft black tipped reef shark doing his rounds. I am posting this via satellite so I can only post one image at the moment so I will do another short post about the underwater scene.

There are some challenges involved in 'getting away from it all'. There is only a very small village on the island and that is about ten miles away on the NW side of the atoll. The nearest actual town is probably Papeete on Tahiti, a four day sail from here so we need to be pretty self sufficient. There is on store in the village but the supply boat only comes once a month so pickings will be slim. We are well stocked up on food and making water so we can go a couple of months or more before we need to move. We have no phone service so the satellite link is our only communications. It is nice to be able to get emails and post this but, to be honest, a spell with zero internet would be fine by me. I know it is going to upset me but I cannot resist the occasional look at what passes for news these days, even if it does take fifteen minutes to download an image-free web page.

We think we will probably stay here for another month then move down to a nearby atoll, Makemo, that apparently has a dive operation. After that we are not sure. Janaki needs some dental work in Tahiti so we might sail there and then back to the Marquesas, just another 1,200nm.....

I will pop up a short post to get an underwater pic up and, as soon as I get some half way reasonable internet I will put up a photo album but that might be a ways off.