Tahiti

This place is something. Papeete is one busy metropolis. Crazy place. Shops, restaurants, street vendors, an incredible daily farmers market. Beautiful produce. We think we’ve died and gone to provisioning heaven. Chandleries for boat parts, hardware stores, electronic gear, fishing gear. It would be perfect if it weren’t for the fact that it is complete bedlam. We just returned the rental car with no additional damage. Which is a minor miracle. I just about got us killed once and Dawn about took out a moped with two guys on it in a round about.. One guy jumped off the bike and was chasing us down the highway. Get me the heck out of here!

In other news. We had a good time here. I definitely don’t need to come back but it was interesting. Got a lot of boat issues taken care of. I think the theory is that you sail around the incredible French Polyneasian islands till everything is broken then you come to Tahiti to get it all fixed. Then get out.

They have some crazy one way streets and round a bouts but a difficult one for us to get used to is that in spite of traffic bedlam when you get to a painted crosswalk all traffic has to stop and let you cross. I about hit a couple of pedestrians because the cross walks are everywhere. If they didn’t have that law you would never get across a street here.

But, as has been the case in most of Polynesia, the people are very friendly and helpful. Also helps that there is some English spoken to keep us hopeless Americans out of trouble. If you ask for directions it’s more than likely that they will not direct you there, they will take you there. We have had free cab rides, help getting money changed, help finding the port captain. I went into a fishing gear store looking to replace one of my reels. The fellow didn’t have what I needed so he drew me a map to one of his competitors so I could find one. Apologizing that he couldn’t take me there because he had no one to watch the store while he was away. We were on an island tour in the rental car looking for a particular restaurant that we knew to be hard to find. Way up a mountain they said.  Couldn’t find the way up so we stopped at a gas station to try to get some directions. We had a name and a cartoon map from Avis. The guy behind us in line says you will never find it. I will take you there. So we follow him and his buddy through all kinds of twists and turns finally leading to what looks like a golf cart path. He says that’s all the further he can go but we will make it in our miniature little car. Says its 15 minutes up and worth it. Best lookout point in Tahiti. This stuff goes on all the time. I will not live long enough to repay the kindness we have been shown. Oh, and after all that, the restaurant was closed. That also goes on all the time.

View from the top of the mountain. Smoked some clutch getting there and some brakes getting back. Sorry Avis. Vivo is actually in there. Somewhere upper left. So is a s$%tload of everything else. 

A rainy tour day but a really nice waterfall. A good memory of  Tahiti.

New crew. And Dawn.

Jam night on Vivo. From left, Ivan, a very good singer, Me, Jonny three chord, Lorenzo and Scott. Both very talented guitar players and vocalists. It was a blast. 

Vivo welcomes Brian and Lauren to the crew. They will be with us for a couple of weeks. Hitchhiking a ride to Bora Bora. They are from an ARC boat that is dropping out of the rally in Tahiti. We also said goodbye to Iris. Sadly. She was a great crewmember and her boundless energy and humor was great to have on board. She heads back to France to see family. We hope to see her again. She will be missed. She might rejoin us in Australia. We hope so.

From here we island hop to Bora Bora. Maybe three stops along the way. Not sure yet. Getting a little behind in my route planning. Sloppy actually. It’s kind of like…. We will leave sometime, and go someplace, and then get to where we are supposed to be, maybe. I could stay here forever. Maybe that’s why my brain wants nothing to do with planning how to leave Polynesia.

Probably a dry spell for Wi-Fi after we leave here. Actually here is called Wee Fee. You say whyfi and no one knows what you’re talking about.

Goodbye Tahiti.     Hello…..        not sure yet.    But I hope we catch some fish on the way. With my awesome new 400 yard reel. Bring it Marlin! I got your number!

peace

M

Moorea

What a difference a day makes. A 32 hour cruise from the flat Tuomotos and we find Moorea. The sister island of Tahiti. We will go to Tahiti in a couple of days after we explore Moorea.

Anchored in Cook Bay. Named after Captain Cook (although we are told he never sailed into this particular bay). Beautiful mountainous green covered peaks of basalt. Unbelievable how steep these canyons are. They go up nearly a mile. We rented a car and drove around the island. Took a couple of hours. With stops. Not a very big island. Very friendly people and pretty easy driving. Especially since I forgot to bring my drivers license to the rental place so Dawn had to drive the whole thing. So I saw a beautiful island. Dawn saw a lot of winding, twisting, pot holed roads.

Vivo is the cat on the right. The one on the left are our friends Nexus.

The first night we were here was the usual Friday night happy hour, dinner and show at the local resort.  Nice place. They didn’t seem to mind a few ARC boats invading and clogging up their dingy dock. Dinner and drinks were very nice. Actually got most of what we ordered so that was a surprise. The after dinner local show was very nicely done. Sometimes you get the feel that they would rather be home watching reruns than doing the show but this group was very good. Very proud of their culture and it showed. We really enjoyed it. Seemed like they did as well. After they invited everyone to come up and get a picture taken with the group. Started off kind of slow as no one seemed to want to be the first but it got going pretty well after a couple of boats and crew got their pix. For us it turned out to be one of my favorite pictures so far. Dawn and Merc and I were in there for one then Iris and Lorenzo photo bombed it. That’s the one that is my favorite. But where is Bob you might ask? As well you should. Well, Bob had been running to the bar and getting drinks and got to be quite popular with the gals serving there. Seems Bob got one free for every one he bought. Or maybe two free. Not sure. At any rate when we went up for the picture Bob was nowhere to be found. We did find him later on and got him back to Vivo safely. He had a good time. Not that he remembers but we filled him in the next day. We are going to have to Photoshop him into the picture at some point. I am looking for a picture of him in a suit at a wedding or something and I will insert him in there. Should be a bit of fun.

Think we were having a little fun? Wheres Bob?????

So we take the rental car back to a place we had passed the day before. Lagoonaquarium they call it. It’s a small island, (motu), just off shore where they have a snorkel and feed the critters attraction. Kind of Disney but kind of interesting. The stingrays and reef sharks are quite accustomed to people and they swim right in amongst us. Little kids with swimmies on with stingrays and reef sharks going under them. They have the utmost respect for he nature here but they very much live with them. We are getting used to being in close proximity with these animals. More so that I would have thought. Now I am only scared of pirates. Sharks are way cool by me.

Please don't bite me Mr. Shark. This is not zoomed in or cropped.

Mr. Charles. Ray to his friends.

Nice place this island. In the end we spent three days there. I would love to go back.

Oh, wait! Get this! I went to church! Easter Sunday Dawn wanted to go to a local service so we found the Catholic Church across the island and off we go. The five of us. (Me, Dawn, Merc, Bob, Lorenzo) First time I had been to church in…. hmmm… no idea. Bob as well. Was waiting for lighting to come down but, a nice surprise, it never did. Nice service. All in French and Polynesian so I understood about as much as I usually would have anyway. But very nice people. Very welcoming. You know the part where you say “peace be with you” and you shake hands. They say something in Polynesian and kiss on the cheeks. Guys, Gals, everybody. Got all kinds of kissed on that day. Pretty women, hairy women, guys with huge face tats, and a priest for crying out loud. I am not kidding. They smooch like it’s going to be illegal tomorrow. It’s a very nice formality but I don’t think it will ever catch on in the states. To bad. Except for the large tattooed guys and the priest I got to kind of like it.

So we get ready to head for the big city. Papeete, Tahiti. Have been told it will be a bit of a culture shock after the places we have been accustomed to for the last couple of months. We are heading for the city dock, which has been the source of a lot of rumors. Like, its closed for construction, or its full and no more boats may enter, you have to get clearance to go past the airport, or this, or that. We’ll find out soon.

I am posting this from Tahiti where we arrived yesterday. All I can say about Papeete is……..   bedlam.   Rented a car and broke about ten traffic laws in the first ten minutes driving here. Chaos. More to follow. If I don’t kill myself in the rental minican car.

M

Rangiroa

This place is nothing short of spectacular. An atoll like Ahe but on a much larger scale. You cannot see from one side of it to the other. 40 miles long. 15 or so wide. The color of the water seems almost fake. So brilliantly blue and azure. People are friendly. Unlike the alien colony on Ahe. Dawn flew in so the world is complete now.

 

Nice place for a bike ride!

There are only two entrances to the Atoll. In spite of being 110 miles in circumference. Both pretty easy and wide. But they run fast and hard when the tides are moving. Pods of dolphins come and surf the standing waves. Just for fun. I am trying to get some pictures to post. One of the German fellows on Dingy has some pictures that look like a national geographic cover. 

There is a place they call the aquarium. It’s along side of a sand bar at one of the entrances. About 500 yards from where we anchored. It hides behind the rip tide and has almost no current. Quite remarkable given that the other side of the bar can have 4-5 knots. The snorkeling there is unbelievable. You drop off the side of the dingy into thousands of fish. One area is carpeted in green coral with deep fissures and crags with all kinds life in them. There are a couple of large moral eels. Then the sharks start to meander by. White tip and black tip. I have some gopro video of black tip sharks going by with Dawn in the frame. At one point there were three black tip sharks under us. That got me a little nervous. They are not a problem while alone but get more aggressive as their numbers increase. In Galapagos when there were three of them schooling our guide hustled us back to the boat.

Bob, being devoured! OK, not really.

So many fish you cannot get a picture of the fish! Who is this guy mugging in the front?

Had dinner with friends from Trillium last night. At a place called Chez Lili. Lili is an amazing person. Originally from Madagascar. A one woman show. And the food is 5 star. We kind of overwhelmed her. 8 of us and another ARC table of 10. So Iris and Lorenzo pitched in to help. Iris knew her from a previous trip here last year when she waited tables for Lili to pay for scuba dives. Last we saw of the two of them they were doing dishes and hanging laundry. What a great crew. And they commute to and from Vivo by kayak so they are very energy efficient.

Went on a guided tour of a place called Reef Island. An hour by powerboat. This is one big atoll. Waded to shore with our packs and snorkel gear and found a little slice of aquatic heaven. It is one of the shallow cuts that are inflows and outflows with the tides. Not deep enough and to many coral heads for boats. The life was amazing. The water so blue and the sand so white it hurt my eyes. So I’m snorkeling along with tears running down into my facemask. We thought that was cool. Then we gathered and did a short hike on the reef to a truly other worldly spot. A lava flow must have hit the surf line some millions of years ago. It created a wall of jagged lava that blocks the incoming surf. But it flows through the porous formations. We drift snorkeled the shallow inland salt water river that it creates. I have video of passing through it. Ran into a variety of sea cucumber that is about 6 foot long. Looks like an undulating piece of vacuum cleaner hose. With some alien looking tendrils that scour for food. Remember the movie tremors? Its that worms little brother. I guess they can’t hurt you. Other than scare the creepy snot out of you. So after a while at that spot off we go to the next destination. The guide says we are heading to the next motu (segment of the Atoll rim.) for lunch. Thought he was kidding. It was about ¼ mile across a tidal flat that had a couple of knots of current flowing. And it went to chest deep. So we do a platoon march into the pass. Took maybe 15 or 20 minutes for everyone to get across. Dodging coral and sea urchins. The lunch was excellent. Rice, grilled fish and chicken, coconut bread, ceviche. All made at home by the head guide. Then he had the women of the group weaving baskets. Quite comical. He was a very patient instructor. I would have hit someone upside the head. It was like a summer camp craft project. Where everyone gets a ribbon but some of the projects look like monkeys made them. While we were there a school of 3-5 foot black tip sharks formed off the beach. Couple of dozen or so. We entertained ourselves tossing little bits of leftover food and trying to grab one by the tail. Real bright huh? Well, I’ve got video to prove it. I wonder why sharks bite people. You grab one by the azz and they just might add you to the menu. The irony was that the boat we would wade out to and leave on was on the other side of the ticked off sharks. So….  us guys stood around (grammar check that one!) hoping that we were not up next for arts and crafts. Since we had been giving the gals such a hard time we knew the payback would be brutal. Then across the shark bank for an hour back in the powerboat for a dip at the aquarium. The fish schools were so dense you had a hard time dropping off the boat. It was solid fish. The local guides toss fish scraps in to keep the fish interested. And they know the boats individually. When our yellow boat showed up they were all over it. When we went there in the dingy we did not get the same welcoming committee. Snorkeled around for a while. So many fish it was hard to get pictures. They were right in front of the camera at all times. There are a couple of moral eels that make a home there. One is huge. Its head the size of a Chicago soft ball. Opens his mouth and the scavenger fish clean its formidable teeth. Another one was pretty good sized. We were looking at it and Dawn said, “Do they ever come out of the hole”? “Don’t know but don’t think they would with us around,” says me. I was wrong! We go back to looking at it and it swims straight up out of its cave right at us. I have a picture of it but its head is barely in frame and its body runs out of frame. It was about 3 foot long and that’s how close it came. Then back down to its hole. Probably chuckling the whole way. Going to tell his drinking buddies that night how he scared the @$%^@$%^ out of the mono horn butt fish. (That’s what moray eels call snorkelers.)

I shaved! It hurt. Good thing I only have to do it when Dawn comes around.

Bob and Lorenzo in their new badazz hats! Really funny till someone looses an eye.

So one more dinner at the wonderful place called Lilli’s and we get ready to leave paradise.  We will miss Rangiroa and the beauty of its people and waters. A divers heaven.

So we leave at 7:00 AM for Moorea. The sister island of Tahiti. 221 miles and no wind. It’s hot and raining. And we caught a Cormorant while fishing. Those are not very bright birds. Saved it though. Reeled it in and got it untangled. It bit me and flew off. Probably come back later and poop on the boat somewhere. Should have eaten it.

Cormorant, its whats for supper. Naw, I let him go. After the ingrate bit me!

Next up…….   Moorea. In the French Society Islands.

M

Ahe

At least it’s easy to pronounce. Other than that nothing much here. Three day passage to get here. Very nice transit. If they were all just three days! And our new crew Lorenzo is quite a cook. He inventoried our stores and came up with a couple of meals that were nothing short of awesome. Even crippled as he was by my no lactose requirement. Tell an Italian or a French cook that they cannot use butter, cream, milk or cheese and watch their reaction. IMPOSIBLE!!! CANNOT BE DONE!!!! But now there is one French gal and one Italian guy who it can. It’s not as good. OK, it’s not nearly as good! But I don’t have to spend 15 months circumnavigating from the comfort of the head. (Head is the bathroom on a boat my dirt dwelling friends.) Which is where I get to live after dosing with the aforementioned.

So we are in Ahe. A submerged volcanic rim. One of many in the island chain of the French Tuomotos. Couldn’t be more different than the Marquesas. Flat, low lying, narrow bands/rings of land. Hard to imagine life here. One entrance in and out on this particular one. Some have more than one. You have to gage it with the tide or you battle some very strong currents that are either trying to pull you in or flush you out. We went against the “flush you out” current. Very interesting. We buddy boated here with our friends on Nexus from the Marquesas’. Also a 60 foot cat. They went through first. Kind of like running up a river with a couple of curves in it. It’s not very far into the inner rim but pretty dramatic with the seas crashing along one side and the current flow running out through the middle. 450 foot wide at the entrance and 85 foot wide as you exit into the rim. We are 28 foot wide. I’m sure in reality we had plenty of room but from the helm it had a certain pucker factor. Kudos to the first guy who came into this atoll. Or maybe kudos to the first guy who made it. I’m sure it was some drunken sailor bet. Hey Sven… bet you cant get inside that atoll. Bet I can. Bet you cant. RIP.  Then across the rim through hundreds of black pearl farming buoys. A minefield of them. The town, and I will be generous and call it that, is on the other side of the rim about 5 miles from the entrance. Don’t know why they didn’t just put it by the entrance. We took the dingy over and went to explore. 7 minutes later we were on the outer rim of the atoll looking out. Turned around and headed back looking for the…. “Fill in the blank”….   Beach bar, Tiki Hut, Hotel, Resort, Snack Bar, Grocery, Tattoo Parlor, Bordello, Pizza place, heck, anything. Nope. We are going to have to be our own entertainment here that’s for sure.

Nexus organized a happy hour on the beach next to the dock. Got permission from the owner to hang out there. So about 6 boats of us head over there for a get together. Some of the crews we hadn’t seen for a while as we had all spread out during the Marquises cruising. Compared notes and stories. Good fun. But surprisingly no one from the island had any interest in it. I would have thought someone would come by to sell something or whatever the local version of a mola is. Nothing. Most of the places we have been the locals jump all over it and set up souvenir shop. Food for sale. Kids running around hamming it up for photos. Fun interactions. Here the pearl farms must provide for everything they need. They have no interest in interacting with outsiders. Or perhaps, it is an alien colony, disguised as a pearl farm, in a volcano crater, in the middle of the pacific, protected by an almost impassable entrance to their lair. Now there is the start of an interesting story. One part goes like this…. “So the Man/Woman on the tricycle with the small bag of black market black pearls sat quietly behind a palm tree observing. We are pretty certain He/She is an alien scout.” And I am not making up any of that! Well, maybe the alien part but the jury is out on that one. I s#$t you not there is a He/She on a red tricycle (three wheel bike) peddling up and down the two block long street looking for strangers to sell black market pearls to. I would have taken a picture but I was afraid. I so do not want to be assimilated here. Its just to boring.

Got hooked up with a tour of the local black pearl farming. Came about like this. There is nothing to do here. No organized anything. No stores. No one coming out to see if you want to buy anything. No tour business. Nada. One of the ARC boats went looking for a tour. So they actually went door to door asking for a tour guide. Found Quentin and his wife. Young couple. He from Tahiti, she born on Ahe. He works at the farm so yes, he would give a tour. 3000 francs a head. Thirty bucks. So we got wind of this through the VHF grape vine and Nexus asked them to let them know how it went. They tell Nexus its good and we book crew of three boats for the next day. Vivo, Nexus and American Spirit. Quentin speaks pretty good English. He went to school in New Zealand for a couple of years when he was a kid. So off we go to the black pearl love shack. Interesting operation. Extremely manual. The only power they have is one 12V battery to run a boom box and one motorcycle battery to run a hand held dremel tool to drill small holes to string the oysters. No lights. When it gets dark, go home. Duh! Got the run through of the whole process. Takes years. The lagoon is covered with acres of floats each marking a tubular string of maybe 300 oysters all doing their oyster thing. That being eating poo and making black pearls. It’s a tough job but some oyster has to do it. They also had pearls for sale. I’m waiting till Dawn is here to go for that. A couple of the gals bought some. The guys drank coconut water and waited. And waited. And waited. Seriously how friggin long can it take to pick out a couple of pearls. They are round and shinny. Pick two! Or ten! But lets move on. At one point someone rolled a pearl off the table and onto the very coarse, spongy, wet plywood floor. I won’t say who but her name rhymes with Laurie and the boat name rhymes with Nexus. Took a few minutes to find it. And it was Quentin’s wife who found it. There are 400 people living on this atoll. 80 of them work in the pearl farms. We wish them the best. Aliens or not.

Pearl Farm

Buy some pearls?

Lose a pearl?

Lorenzo was going diving so he needed to get sheared.

Did not go well.

Don't know. Just thought this looked cool.

A cat at sunset.

This is what you do while pearls are being selected. No rum unfortunately. 

Then it started raining. And boy did it. By morning I had to pump almost a foot of water out of the dink. Every cistern on the island must be overflowing. Showers will be had by all. If aliens shower that is. We are stuck under a frontal system that does not seem to want to move. Either no wind or 30 knots. And rain out the whazoo. Hoping to clear up today. We need to leave and get to Rangiroa. We all seem to have our anchor chains wrapped up on coral heads. We are anchored in 70 feet of water. The coral heads come up 20-30 feet. As you swing with the wind you wrap up on them. Can’t beat fun in the O’l anchorage. A boat that left yesterday had divers in the water for almost an hour clearing the jumble. We are hoping for an easier time of it. We’ll see.

The easier time of it. Nope. Didn’t go that way. A couple other boats pulled hooks with a bit of finagling but we caught up bad. My plan was to exactly backtrack our course in to where we dropped ignoring all the traces we left as we swung around. Got very close and wham. No love. Dropped chain and moved sideways a bit to give a tug. Same thing. Did a spin and pulled opposite. Rock solid. Or coral solid as it were. Our anchor had made sweet love to a coral head and the two did not want to part. Another boat got a snorkeler in the water to help out. It was quite deep and visibility was a little poor but what he described was not good. The chain goes under a coral head and he cannot even see the anchor. That’s about as bad as it gets. Another boat was getting suited up to dive it for us with crowbars. My dive hookah can go 60 foot but that’s about 15 foot short of what we needed. Going to look for another 60 foot of dive line in Tahiti. Any way as they were preparing to get in the water we tried a couple of Hail Mary numbers on it. There was no way it should have worked. It snagged then gave a little bit and Bob went for it with the windlass. Presto up she comes. We were ecstatic. This was about 40 minutes or so of a fight. Normally that’s about a 5-minute process. So were off. Whooping it up. We were headed 5 miles over to the pass to do some drift diving. That’s when you take the dingy out of the pass as the tide is coming in and drop in to let the current sweep you back into the atoll. We were one of three boats going with this plan. When we got to the pass, where there is supposed to be an anchorage, all we find is very deep water or shallow water with endless coral heads to snag on. The thought of dropping into 90 or 100 feet of water full of unseen coral heads was not to appealing. We got into trouble with 70 feet of water. After reconnoitering the area for a while we all decided against anchoring. We would motor and drift around while rotating people in turns out to drift dive the pass. The rip current was quite something. As we pass through it we were slid sideways like we were on ice. We gave each other rating like ice skaters. The mono American Spirit liked it so much they went back and ran thought it again. There was no risk involved but it was quite impressive to see that large of a craft just slid sideways by the current. On about the third or fourth pass the tide shifted and started going out. The ebb b tide disappeared in a matter of minutes. The last group that went though experienced the tide swing in mid dive. The dives are only about 15 minutes. That’s how fast you get swept through. Half way through it reversed and started sweeping them out. Not dangerous. The dingy was right there but that must have been something to experience. So we collected everyone. Hosed off the salt and hit the pass. Outgoing tide to help us on our way. 2 ½ hours into the 15 hour passage to Rangiroa and we have already lost two lures and a few hundred feet of line. One really big marlin about pulled Bob in. Before it broke the line and made off it gave us a bit of a show. 4, maybe. 5 foot fish. To big for my gear. All we want is a little tuna or Mahi. These big guys are killing us!

And then someone said something about the Ahenians being a very quiet peoples. Then we got thinking how similar Ahenian is to Alien. Just a coincidence? I don’t think so.

Aliens goodbye.

Rangirowa here we come. Warm up the Wi-Fi and cool down the beer. You are about the get ARC’d.

peace

M