7/6/12-14/6/12 

The wind changes overnight, the anchorage at Fakarava north is now exposed and becomes increasingly uncomfortable, with a sharp chop building down the entire length of the 30 mile lagoon. It is now time to move on, so we raise our anchor and set sail for our next atoll 40 Nm away, Toau.

Just before entering the anchorage, we catch a huge yellow fin tuna. We are doing circles with the boat for over an hour, but finally we landed the fish. Needless to say when we arrived into harbor we were very popular. Anyone for fish?

Toau is a small atoll, 30 Nm long, owned by one local family. Valentine and Gaston are extremely friendly welcoming couple. They even have made a dozen moorings to make life easy for visiting cruising yachts.

Valentin and Gaston offer dinners for small groups of yachties that stay in their lagoon.   But this time they would have to prepare a feast for 60 guests coming in on 6 large charter boats which is something they have never done.  As there is no shop on the atoll, preparing a feast for 60 people is a lot of work.  So we offered to chip in with some manual labour.   Here are some pics of what we got up to.

Dennis and Neville (SV Dreamtime) chopping up wood for the fire – don’t they look manly! 

Dennis grating coconut to make coconut milk - an essential ingredient of Polynesian cooking.

Manual coconut grater screwed onto, you guessed it.  A killer whale vertebra. 

Dennis and the boys filleting fish. 

Dennis showing off some speared octopus.

To prepare it, first the intestine are removed.

 Then the outer mucus is removed by rubbing over stones.  

And the meat tenderized by bashing.   Boil for 2 hours then devour.

Gaston and Phillipe preparing the pork.

Supreme barbecue lobster.   Get in quick there is not much left!

Setting the table and decorations.

It was a successful night. We enjoyed it so much that we decided to have two more dinner parties during our stay. We haven’t eaten so well in a long time.

We dived the reef – highlights were a pair of moray eels and a lion fish.

In between the feasts, Valentine did some pearl harvesting. In the traditional Polynesian way, she kindly gave us a few as a keepsake. 

It was a fantastic way to end our stay in the Tuamotus.

15/6/12-16/6/12 TAHITI and the Society Islands

We make a fast 215 Nm beam sail to arrive in Tahiti just before sunset. We averaged 7.2 Kn in 12-15 knots of wind. Ideal speed for fishing – we catch a large mahi mahi! 

Tahiti is comprised of two islands – Tahiti nui and Tahiti iti separated by a narrow isthmus.

17/6/12-18/6/12

First stop Baie de Tautira. Tautira has a small village, with such generous and friendly locals. The village has a shop that sells vegetables – this was very exciting given that we hadn’t seen vegetables since leaving America.

We spent a day hiking through the valley. 

Dennis swimming down the river! The river had distinct blue colour through it – very pretty. 

19/6/12-20/6/12

We sail around the Tahiti Iti to an anchorage in between the two islands, Port Phaeton in the isthmus. Nice sheltered anchorage of course we caught another large Mahi Mahi on the way in.

21/6/12-26/6/12

32 Nm downwind sail into Papeete, the capital of fench Polynesia. Strong winds and squalls make it an uncomfortable sail.  Lost another fishing rig on a monster of the deep.   The rougher the sea the bigger the fish.

Dennis’s dad flys in and will be joining us for the next month of the trip as we sail around the Society islands of French Polynesia.

Papeete is a small city. Despite the fact that it is busy, the locals are still very friendly. Our organisation is a little chaotic thanks to the happy hour at le Pink Coconut – and all the things we needed to do on the boat that had to wait until we got into civilization still can’t be done! Oh well!

We spend a day doing a 4WD tour into the “valley with 1000 waterfalls” and around the volcanic crater.   

14/5/12 - 18/5/12 Bye Bye Marquesas, Hello Tuamotu islands

We had a slow 4.5 day 455 Nm sail to the Tuamotu islands, the land of coconuts and tropical marine life. These are small coral islands that were originally volcanic mountains that have sunken back into the sea, ever so slow. This allowed the coral to grow and now only fringing coral remains. 

 The coral reef is a hazard to sailing boats, hitting a reef can result in a sunken boat in minutes! Only until the advent of GPS did sailing become safe enough for boaters to come here. GPS, however won't tell you if you're about to hit a bommie and so you need someone on the constant lookout. Better vantage from high up - See Dennis standing on the boom.

18/5/12 - 24/5/12 Tahanea atoll

Tropical paradise, uninhabited bird reserve.

Time for snorkelling. We snorkel through the little channels, being pushed along by the current. There is heaps of marine life - coral stacked on top of coral, schools of every reef fish imaginable and at least 3 sharks every time you put your mask on.  Can you believe it awesome! See for yourselves!

Excellent spearfishing - Dennis is getting particularly good at catching dinner. The fish tastes best roasted on the barbi.

We had a day out into the middle of the atoll to a small island with thousands of birds. Nice sail but had to keep an eye out for coral bommies. Good snorkeling.

One night, we decided to go coconut crab hunting on an island in the SE corner of the atol. Coconut crabs are large land dwelling crabs which eat coconuts! They are able to husk a coconut and will amputate fingers and toes within seconds. We weren't sure how we were meant to catch the crabs or if it was legal on this island but after spearing some fish for lunch, we wanted some crab for dinner. It turned out to be relatively easy - there are many crabs on this island and they hang out on the beach and move very slowly. The trick is to put a stick infront of them and they will instinctively grab hold of the stick - end of the hunt. We found 4 within 1 hour! Had we been sure it was legal we would have cooked them on an open fire. They have a sac at the back full of coconut oil which makes for nice dipping sauce.  I'm sure it would have been tasty ;-)

We didn't get any pics but this a pic I found of one in case you were wondering what a coconut crab might look like.   They are the worlds biggest hermit crab.   They start out in life using a small mollusk as a home then later on in life they use a coconut as protection.  Finally they become so big they no longer need the protection of an artificial shell.

24/5/12 - 28/5/12 - Fakarava island

Next stop was Fakarava island 47 Nm away - very do able distance by day but you have to time your exit and entry of the atolls, due to current within the passes, and so we decided to do an overnight sail. A large pod of dolphins joined us for sunset, taking it in turns to play with the bow of the boat. Wind picked up to 20-25 knots and we were going to fast despite reducing our sail, so we decided to bare pole and to our surprise we were still sailing between 4-5 knots!

Fakarava island is the one of the larger atolls, 30nm long. The reason we came here and the reason why many come here is to dive with the sharks. You do a drift dive from the entrance of the south pass, towing your dinghy behind you. Down to 20m and we saw 200 sharks eek! mainly black tips, but also white tips, silver tips, black fin and grey reef sharks.

After we had our fill of diving, we decided to feed the shark, within minutes we had around 50 sharks circling the boat, trying to get a bite!

29/5/12- 31/5/12 Passage across Fakarava island

We spent a few days sailing through the atoll to enjoy a beach bonfire and hang out  with the locals.

Ferme and Iris are a  lovely hospitable local couple who live on a coconut plantation that we met half way up the atoll. They invited us over for drinks - Jack Daniels and coconut juice! Like this couple, many locals speak french, and no english. Nikki has audio french lessons which she has been motivated to do for the last two months when we realised that we couldn't get by with speaking just english! The lessons seem to be working, we think we had a basic but good conversation across the evening. Ferme entertained us with his guitar and singing.

Look at the many gifts we received - coconut straw hat, mollusks and of course coconuts!

1/6/12- 5/6/12 - Rotoava, Fakarava North

Onward sail to the most northern part of the atoll and we anchor at Rotoava. This town is large enough to have two churches, two shops, a post office, a paved road and most excitingly a tasty ice cream shop.

The Tuamotu islands were previously big pearl producers and as we sailed through the atoll we had to dodge many pearl buoys that had drifted into the channel.

Our collection of rare and alluring mollusks. 

We took a tour of Hinano pearl farm which was interesting to see how pearls are cultured. The highlight of the tour was Dennis buying Nikki a pearl necklace and set of earrings!