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.