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