Slideshow French Polynesia 2006

Not a lot new to report. Our last morning in Huahine we went ashore for a few last minute supplies and found the entire population of the island congregated on the waterfront for a series of races in the local outrigger fleet. These are canoe-shaped boats with an outrigger – the local name for them is va’a. They are paddled by a crew of some six or eight. It was all very festive.

We sailed from Huahine (Jan – the manta ray was in Baie d’Avea where we anchored a couple of days) to Raitaia and Tahaa. Raitaia has a small yacht club where Raven will be tied up while Rod and Elize go on their annual vacations after our visit. Elize leaves mid December for a month and when she returns, Rod leaves in January for his month. Elize is going home to Canada to spend Christmas with her family, and Rod is returning to the Philippines where he has hopes of eventually purchasing some land.

Raitaia and Tahaa are sister islands sharing the same lagoon and encircled by a necklace of reef and motus. A motu is a very small tropical island with sandy beaches and coconut palms – quite the classic image of a castaway island in paradise. We anchored one night in Tahaa, splashing around in amazing turquoise colored waters and exploring a motu. The rock is limestone fossilized from ancient coral and it is weird to see the coral shapes in the gray stone. Rod was wading in ankle deep water and a teeny tiny black-tipped reef shark made a hopeful pass at his toes, chasing Rod right back up onto the beach. By the way, I’m sure the biggest threat to our safety in the South Pacific, much more so than the marine life, would be the coconut palms. I’ve heard they kill up to 10,000 people annually worldwide by dropping coconuts onto the heads of passers by.

The next night we moored off the yacht facilities in Raiatea and had a short exploratory walk and dinner ashore. We also tried a couple of dives. The first was a total failure – dirty water, fast-moving current – so we gave it up. The second was the wreck of the Nordby, a 3-masted copra schooner that sank in 1900. It lays right off a resort with bures on stilts built out into the water only some 50 feet away. The fish are obviously fed here – no sooner did we enter the water when a school of six or so big surgeonfish, maybe 18″ long each, surrounded us looking for a handout. They nibbled on anything dangling off our dive gear – a writing slate, a small bag; they also tried for fingers and poked their faces right into the camera lens.

Yesterday (Monday) we woke up in a grey cloud. It proceeded to pour steadily the entire day. On shore the steep green hillsides sprouted waterfalls. Raven enjoyed a thorough freshwater bath and we filled up the water tanks with runoff (2,400 liters = 2.4 tons). We aborted our planned sail to Bora Bora and just hung out in the saloon and played with computers and read books, our usual rainy day entertainment. Mostly I organized all my photos into keepers and rejects and did some rough editing on them. If I ever get to an internet café I’ll upload them and let you know they’ve been posted…otherwise they’ll keep until we get home.

Clearer skies today, so now we are off to Bora Bora, reputed to be one of the most beautiful islands in the world. It lies only 10-12 miles from here but our trip will be 30 miles as we are sailing to the far shore of the island. We want to be sure we arrive in advance of Michelle’s flight arriving Thursday morning. The airport in Bora Bora is only accessible by boat, so we will be picking up Michelle and her baggage by dinghy!

I don’t know if it has made it into the US news or not, but Fiji is on the verge of a military coup – again. We’ve been receiving travel warnings (by email) from the State Department warning tourists to stay away. New Zealand and Australia are sending peace-keeping troops, and New Zealand has closed down its embassy. Rest assured for those of you not familiar with the geography in this part of the world – Fiji is some 2,000 miles away from French Polynesia. We really enjoyed our visits to Fiji the last two summers – it looks like our timing was good for moving on to new cruising grounds this year. I do miss the Fijian diving – so far the Polynesian waters do not even begin to compare.

So much for “not a lot of news to report”. We are always surprised to realize how much does get squeezed into each day on the boat.

We’ll be back home in Tucson in just over a week – hard to believe it’s almost the end of our trip when it feels like we’ve only just arrived. We plan to return to French Polynesia in late March for a month long cruise to the more far flung island groups – the Tuamotus and the Marquesas. Very different from here and a good departure zone for Raven’s next port of call which will be Hawaii in May. Rod and Elize are already set with their U.S. visas.