HUAHINE, August 16-22

A very fast overnight passage brought us from Moorea to Huahine sooner than we wanted. A distance of about 90 miles, this passage cannot be confidently done during daylight hours, so is best done overnight, with arrival planned for daylight. The book recommended leaving at dusk through Moorea's pass, traveling at about 5 knots through the night, to arrive in the morning with good light to enter Huahine's pass. We figured a double-reefed main and staysail instead of our genoa would give us a nice speed to make the trip properly, but once we got outside the pass we found ourselves averaging 7-8 knots in 20-25 knots of wind, despite quite lumpy seas that made the going harder. We put a third reef in the main, and eventually dropped the staysail to sail under the main alone, and still did over 6 knots at times. Why is it that when you don't want to go fast, the boat and conditions insist on it, and when you'd like more speed they won't cooperate. As we approached the southern tip of the island around 4 a.m., still several miles from the pass into the village, we had a bit of an argument about course - I wanted to stay well off the fringing reef while it was still dark, Bryan thought we could safely go in closer. Perhaps because of my adventures in the Pacific 25 years ago when one boat I was on went on 2 reefs in one day and another ended up drifting without a rudder for 8 days I am very leery of getting close to reefs during the night when they can't be easily seen. Once Bryan realized why I was so adamant he agreed to hold off changing course to approach the reef until we were in a safer position.

We safely arrived at the pass at 7:30 a.m., and entered to anchor off the town of Fare amidst several old friends: LaGitana, Do It, Happy Monster, Promesa, Gammel Dansker and others. We were exhausted from a night of not sleeping, so slept through most of the day. Oliver from Bess stopped by about 5 p.m. when he finally saw us up and around, and invited us into the beach for a potluck, which it turned out, was also a birthday party for him. We reluctantly declined because he said others were already in there, and we figured that by the time we got the dinghy in the water, the engine on, and figured out what food we could take and got it prepared, the party would be over. We kicked ourselves the next day when we found out they'd partied until 11, and that it would have been our only chance to see several of the crews as they were leaving the next morning.

The next morning, Friday, we launched the dinghy and went ashore to check in with the gendarme. After spending about 30 minutes in an outer office being almost totally ignored while the gendarme chatted with friends inside, we left. We checked out the Chinese grocery store across from the dock, which from the outside looked fairly modest, only to find it was absolutely huge inside, and had a great selection and on some items better prices than we'd found elsewhere. We rented bicycles for the afternoon and rode around the northern side of the island, stopping at a lovely archeological museum set amongst the ruins of several marae - traditional Polynesian temples - alongside a large body of water that appeared to be a lake, but was actually connected to the ocean by a narrow channel which contained several ancient traditional stone fish traps. Further along we came to the village of Faiea, where dozens of large eels live near a bridge across the river, waiting for nice people like us to throw them some fish. The small store across the road does a big business selling canned fish just for this purpose.
Along the way we passed several homes with graves in the front yards, always covered with roofed structures, often fenced in, and decorated with flowers. We've since seen a few of these front yard graves on other islands, but never as many as we saw on Huahine.
We also saw a lot of homemade mailboxes, or what we thought were mailboxes. We later found out these were actually baguette boxes by the road, for home delivery of French baguettes.

After our several hours of bicycling, we went to the Te Marara restaurant next to the bay where we were anchored for happy hour and dinner with Gammel Dansker, Happy Monster, Bess (we were just now meeting Germans Oliver, Beata and their daughter Eliza), and another German boat new to us, Antje with Norbert and Antje. They are the only ones we've run into who will be on roughly our course after the Societies - Suwarrow, Samoa, then Kiribati on our way to the Marshalls. Happy hour was a treat, the first time we've been offered half-price drinks rather than slightly discounted ones, but they were serious about the "hour" - when I went to order another round just before 6:30, they pointed to their clock which said 6:32 and said no more happy hour. We moved into the dining room for a nice dinner of hamburgers and fries which were quite good and reasonably price.

The next day we motored along the channel inside the fringing reef to the southern tip of the island and Avea Bay. We stopped about half-way along for a nice snorkel and lunch, where we saw our first clown fish - black and blue cousins of the Nemo of "Finding Nemo" fame. It would be another day or two before we found the orange striped clown fish we were expecting. We spent a delightful 4 days in Avea Bay, anchored on a lovely sandy bottom in about 40'. The reef was a mile or more out from land here, with deep navigable waters in close to shore, then broad stretches of sparkly aquamarine water over 2-10 foot shallows dotted with numerous coral heads spreading out to the fringing reef. We did lots of snorkeling. Highlights were the clownfish and the anemones they live in - these anemones did something I'd never seen before - many of them had rolled their bottom fleshy edges up around their dozens of tendrils to form what looked like giant bright pink donuts. There were lots and lots of varied, healthy looking delicate corals in a variety of hues, and a wide variety of exotic fish, surprisingly abundant along the shore in the murkier waters near the small resort.

The Sunday afternoon we arrived we heard music coming from shore, from the Chez Tara beach restaurant, so we dinghied in to check it out. Two men were making lovely Polynesian tunes to entertain a few tables of patrons at tables set in the sand under a magnificent thatched roof at the water's edge. This was the first real beach bar we'd come to that reminded us of sitting with our feet in the sand in the Virgins while drinking a brew to the accompaniment of delightful music. We had a few beers, and decided to come back in for dinner a day or two later. When we did, we had some great breadfruit fries (gratis with our drinks) before having two different shrimp dishes that were elegantly prepared and served - and quite tasty.

This island is far more laid back than Tahiti and Moorea, only a few small resorts, but very lovely - perhaps our favorite of the Society Islands. The anchorage in Avea Bay was just delightful - quiet, usually no more than 5 or 6 boats in a large area, great snorkeling, incredible colors, absolutely crystal clear waters, and abundant fish. Some of the coral is a bit sickly looking, but on the whole in better shape than much we've seen, although it couldn't hold a candle to Fakarava, but maybe no place can. Surprisingly we've seen no soft corals at all here or anywhere else in Polynesia.

Other than going ashore a few times for walks and visits to Chez Tara, we spent our time in Avea Bay snorkeling, exploring in the dinghy, reading, and working on chores on the boat. We tackled our dirty water line once again, the black smudgy stuff left after the grass is scraped off is almost impossible to get off. I could only get about 10 feet of the waterline really clean in about an hour, very slow work requiring massive amounts of elbow grease.

On our motor back north through the channel we stopped for a snorkel across from a small resort. While there was nowhere near as much to see as in Avea, I did find one fascinating new critter on the sandy flats. It looked like a little orange polka-dotted flower on the bottom, but close investigation revealed that is was a variety of sea hare, a mollusk without an external shell. In the Virgins I often found spotted sea hares, leopard-printed creatures that looked like snails that had swallowed ping-pong balls that lived in surging water on shore-side rocks, and occasionally on sandy bottoms. They sometimes squirt purple into the water when picked up, as did these much smaller cousins of theirs that I found on Huahine. The Huahine ones were very pretty, looking at rest on the bottom like tan translucent bells with orange polka dots and orange-edged petals extending off one end. It was only after picking one up that I realized it had the body of a snail that had swallowed a marble with the "petals" fluttering along the upper edge.

We anchored for the night in a different anchorage off Fare with two other boats, Checkmate and Criolla (sp?). New Zealander Tony on Checkmate offered us a chunk of mahi he'd just caught. Seems he doesn't like to eat fish, but caught some to impress his sometime crew Lisa from California who had joined him in Tahiti and was sailing to Bora Bora, before flying back to work in cartoon production. It sounds like she joins him for various legs as he heads home to NZ. We dinghied out to snorkel the southern Fare pass (there are two passes quite close together here - the northern one we'd entered which comes straight into the wharf, and one slightly south of the town.) We found large areas of beautiful coral gardens and lots of fish, but somewhat murky water, perhaps because of the late afternoon hour. Later we spent happy hour at Te Marura where we also met Linda and Bill of Criolla, before going back to the boat for a dinner of lightly fried mahi sandwiches with wasabi/mango/yogurt dressing and tomatoes. Yummy!

On Thursday morning we put the dinghy back on deck, picked up the anchor and headed off to Raiatea, 20 miles to the west.