On a map, the distances look so small. Marquesas to
Tuamotus. Just a small hop. It took us
four nights.
Four beautiful nights though. It’s not often you’ll get me enthusing about
night sailing. I miss my sleep too much. But there was something so smooth, so
soft and pacific about the ocean, something that said, ‘you will never again be
at sea on a night quite this perfect’.
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| The gentle night en route to the Tuamotus |
We left the Marquesas from Ua Pou which remains for us an
unknown island. The first time we couldn’t get the anchor to set; this time we
couldn’t get ashore. Perhaps we could
have tried harder, but cruising is meant to be fun. Bringing the dinghy into the village of
Hakatehau looked as though it might involve crushed limbs and/or shoulders torn
out of armpits. It was enough to watch the
clouds tangle with Ua Pou’s monumental rock obelisks from the anchorage, and then
watch the sun set.
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| Hakatehau bay on the northwest corner of Ua Pou |
After 24 hours, we told ourselves that it couldn’t be
rollier at sea. We might as well get going towards the Tuamotus. The east wind
was fresh. The sea outside the anchorage looked flat. In fact, it was.
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| From the Marquesas to the Tuamotus |
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| Good bye Ua Pou - and the Marquesas |
The moon rose late, so for many black hours the stars were…well, stars. No haze, no cloud. Just great handfuls of cosmic brilliance
flung across the vastness.
The clouds caught up with us, of course. They always
do. The weather is the weather. Restless.
By the time we were approaching our first-ever coral reef
pass, we were dodging rain squalls. Plus the sun was just rising which isn’t
such a smart time to come through a pass, but it was a trade off between
visibility and state of the tide. We entered Kauehi atoll, where the current
runs very strongly out of the lagoon, at low water slack. It was ok for a first
pass. Nothing to bump into if you kept
to your course. No trauma, in other
words – this is important, I think, when you have half an ocean of coral atolls
still in front of you.
A lagoon is a wondrous thing. It blocks the ocean swell.
When we dropped anchor off the village, increasing the crowd of yachts from
three to four, the boat was finally still, for the first time since we left
Panama. The day the motion stopped I could feel tension escaping out of my body.
I hadn’t known it was there. We slept so
well that first night in the lagoon inside Kauehi atoll.
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| Our dinghy and the anchorage of the village on Kauehi |
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| The church is made from coral, and coral limestone |
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| The exodus to Fakarava - in relays |
Kauehi is a very quiet place all round, and even quieter
this week because last Sunday a
50-strong contingent of dancers and singers, footballers, paddlers and
bowlers, left for Fakarava to compete and perform in July festivities. We saw them board the ferry, one-third of the
island’s population. That same day the supply ship Mareva-nui called in, as it
does once a fortnight. The rest of the population came down to the wharf to
snap up carton-loads of food – nearly 100% junk , as far as I could tell. The
ship took away sacks of their copra. The movement of their other crop, black
pearls, is not so easy to track.
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| The copra shed at the dock |
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| Waiting for supplies |
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| Pissing on junk |
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| The people swarm the landed supplies on the dock (and below) |
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| Martha (right) from Silver Fern compares product notes |
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| A barge transports goods between ship and shore |
We’ve come to Fakarava for the festivities too. It’s just five hours sail to the west of
Kauehi, and who can resist consecutive evenings of traditional dance and
singing, competitive coconut spearing and fruit throwing, another Miss/Mister/Mama island contest, not
to mention takeaway mahimahi frites?
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| La fete de Heiva - July festivities (and below) |
Fakarava is the second largest atoll in the Tuamotus. It has
an airport. Its village, called Rotorava, has a post office, and several shops.
You can get internet here. There’s no internet service on Kauehi.
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| Kauehi pearl fishers live on the lagoon (and below) |
If we’d just wanted to stay still, snorkel/dive in stunningly clear water, watch the palms wave
in the breeze, and a very small world go by slowly, there would have been no
reason at all to leave Kauehi. For a
first South Seas atoll, the one which will be most strongly imprinted on our
memories, we couldn’t have chosen better.
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| This is how you grow a Tahitian pearl |
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| Silver Fern's water crew - Bryce and Martha, Alisdair and Vivienne (and Diana) |
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| New Zealand-flagged yacht Silver Fern |
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| Dive (and snorkelling trip) with Kauehi divers Gary and Sabine |
Not that we chose exactly, but that’s another story.
Something about the wind shifting further and further into the south, and the
currents bending up, and the time of the tides. But you don’t need to know all
that. Just that Kauehi is there, and
unless the oceans rise, probably won’t change much if you don’t get there for
another decade or several.
