Still in Tahanea

Beautiful Day!

The "dock" at Tahanea. The pass we drift dove is in the background

Ann headed for the snorkling spot

It didn’t look like it would turn into such a fun day, since I was up several times last night in big squalls closing hatches and in general checking to make sure we didn’t drag our anchor into the coral. Even during breakfast this morning some black squalls came through threatening to ruin our day. BUT, two good things happened today. The wind has swung around to the north which means the motu that we’re anchored behind is actually protecting us from most of the wind and all of the waves. It’s finally flat water instead of two to three foot waves and a lee shore.

The other thing that was outstanding today is we dinghied over to Orcinius and they hauled anchor and we all took their catamaran (a fifty foot Lagoon) across xxx pass where we came in and over to xxxx pass where we anchored for the day in preparation for a pass dive (more on that below). While waiting for the tide to become favorable for the pass dive we took the dinghy ashore and went for a hike. There’s a couple huts near the pass that are used during copra harvesting season, but nothing else. Well, unless you count the cat. Someone left a kitty cat here. It’s a nice looking young cat, but otherwise looks very healthy. Probably lives on rats, coconut crabs and cruisers. We know of a couple of cruisers who have left food for him/her. We also went shell hunting on the ocean side and found some beautiful sea shells.

But, the pass dive…Basically you take the dinghy at slack or close to slack low water just before the flood and go “outside” the pass into the ocean. From there you jump in the water with the dinghy tied to someone (me) and float into the atoll on the new flood. I have to say, it was one of the most beautiful dives I’ve ever done. We were just snorkeling, but the pass is fairly shallow, so we saw everything you could see by taking tanks and going a dozen feet lower. It was so gorgeous, we did it twice! The second time we rode the incoming current half a mile back to where Orcinius was anchored before getting out. Give Ann kudos for having seen two sharks right at the beginning of the dive and not leaping out in terror. In fact, she didn’t even tell me until we were back on the boat. I’m the only one who didn’t see a shark, probably because I was fumbling with the dinghy line trying to keep from getting drowned. Anyway, tons of live coral, fish-John said they said a Parrot Fish that was three feet long. Orcinius is leaving tomorrow but we’re staying here a couple more days and will likely reposition over to this spot and do this dive again.

We finished the day by having Orcinius over to Charisma for dinner. Ann made fresh baked bread, cornbread muffins and cookies. I made fish chowder out of the Mahi we caught. All were delicious and we enjoyed the evening’s camaraderie after such a fun day in the water. (By the way, don’t tell anyone, but Orcinius is one nice boat-those cats are pretty comfortable)

Tomorrow, if the wind stays out of the north where we’re sheltered by the motu, we’ll dive the reefs right around Charisma. There are several very promising ones. In fact, I was watching a shark feeding frenzy this morning. A couple reef sharks were feeding on 6 inch long fish. You would watch a whole school of a hundred fish leap out of the water followed by several crazed sharks. Boobies would get in the action from the sky and dive for the fish as they jumped out of the water. Fun, exiting!

Expect a further report tomorrow on reef diving progress…

Still at Tahanea

Ann fixing the headboard on the mainsail.

We didn’t do the pass dive today like we thought. Turned out some weather came in during the night. It’s been “close” to rain all day-occasionally spitting-and very cloudy, so we decided to turn it into a boat project day. The one moment of nice weather was at sunset. The clouds to the south of us went away and as the sun set in the west we saw a very green flash. One of the best yet. But by the time we finished dinner and dishes the almost-rain had started again. It has also been windy-a constant 18 knots all day long combined with the two foot waves that come with a five mile fetch from the other side of the lagoon. Yeah, I know-complain, complain, complain. Hopefully tomorrow will be nicer.

Anyway, Ann did the laundry and sewed up a new sail slug attachment on the mainsail headboard. These break about every six months due to chafe. They hold the sail to the mast with three layers of thick nylon webbing. It’s a bigger job than it sounds and took her at least two hours. She also cleaned up after a porthole leak that went down into the food locker (nothing lost since all is vacuum packed) and most important made cookie dough. No cookies for tonight but we’re having Orcinius over tomorrow night for fish chowder, home-made bread and fresh baked cookies! Simple pleasures.

For my part, I took apart the tiller-pilot to find out if I could fix it. We have it attached to the wind vane when we’re motoring and it steers the boat, but the other day it make bad noises and gave up. Turns out the (ahem, Raymarine) tiller pilot has a cheap nylon/plastic retaining ring that keeps the motor aligned with the belt that drives the jack screw. The mechanism “ate” the ring, or at least part of it and it came off, which in turn meant the belt fell off its pulley. There’s really no excuse, since when mounted on the wind vane, there is almost zero effort the thing needs to make. It just swings the vane from side to side and the Monitor does the work. I was able to jam the retaining ring back into its mount and it’s working for now. We’ll see how long that lasts. If it breaks again I’ll have to jury rig a Teflon washer to hold the motor in place until I can get the proper part (if they will sell it at all. A stupid, cheap part. Seems very poorly engineered). Anyway, (rant over) after fixing the tiller pilot I downloaded a bunch of photos from the cameras. A very unproductive job but we take hundreds of photos every couple weeks and if we don’t keep after them, the photos get waaay ahead of us and it becomes a much bigger job. Also it’s been three months since I checked the water in the batteries, so I did that and added ½ gallon of distilled water. Charging and discharging every day, they get quite a workout and need to be carefully maintained. Next check- up: September first.

OK, new rant: The B&G multi-function displays that Svendson’s Marine sold me when I bought Charisma are all starting to conk out. These are the displays that show things like depth, boat speed, wind speed/direction, etc. Three out of four of them have lost their night lights, so you can’t see them anymore at night without a flashlight. I reconfigured the last “good” one at the helm so it displays the critical data at night. They also are developing “lines” through the digital displays. Looks like corrupt data. I cleaned all the contacts/connections and there are fewer lines interrupting the display, but I think they need a software update at the very least. Turns out the “state of the art” displays Svensen’s sold me in 2008 were actually 2005 models that were sitting on the shelf and they wanted to sell them to someone as they were getting obsolete. They’ve been problematic since the day they were installed. OK, second rant over.

For dinner, I took last night’s chicken and yam “thing” I made in the pressure cooker and threw it in the cast iron frying pan with some curry powder. Bam! Instant curry chicken. It actually tasted better than it did last night.

So, it’s only 7PM and we’re finished with dinner and both of us are exhausted from boat projects (and probably a little bit of catching up on sleep from the trip here and maybe the fact that the anchor alarm faithfully wakes me up at least once and sometimes twice per night. I have it set pretty tight since we’re right up against the coral and it’s blowing 18-20 all night. Thus, whenever there’s a 20 degree wind shift we drift far enough to one side to set off the alarm). It gets dark around 5:30 local time and at any rate, we’re about ready for sleep.

Hopefully tomorrow some news on snorkeling. There’s a lot of cool stuff here to see-we just need better weather to see it with.

Position: 16 degrees, 50 minutes south; 144 degrees, 41 minutes west

Doesn't get much clearer than this!

Anchored off Tahanea

Anchored off our own Motu

This spot couldn’t be more beautiful. The word “azure” might have been created to describe the color of the water here. We’re in about 30 feet over coral and sand and about 100 yards off a sandy atoll which is covered with palm trees. Azure, ice blue, turquoise all describe the color of the water we are in.

Getting here was a little challenging. After the “exit” from Raroia which was pretty exciting, we had a long day with no wind. We motored. Not fun. Then after dinner a front moved through. By now, Ann was getting some sleep as it was the second evening watch around 0100. I thought I saw some unusual cloud formation, so checked the radar. Red, red, red, across the screen. Darn! Double reef the main, close the hatches, the usual drill. Also per usual just as I finished and was putting my jacket on, it started raining. This wasn’t just a short squall, the rain lasted almost an hour. The good news though is that it brought wind, so we could finally sail.

We “buddy boated” with Orcinius who has joined us on this leg. We sailed the whole 24 hours here within about three miles of each other. Last night Ann and Lisa on Orcinius were on the first evening watches at the same time on their respective boats and played a trivia game over the VHF radio. Anything to stay awake in the wee hours.

After leaving in such dramatic fashion yesterday at 0815, we were looking for something a little easier today. We sailed along this island and got to the pass around 1000, which was two hours before low tide and 26 hours after leaving Raroia yesterday. Big standing waves and lots of tide action. No bueno. No way were we going through the pass until things changed. We dropped sails and just floated in the current about ½ mile outside, just loitering for two hours waiting for slack water. It worked. At noon, we decided to take another look at the pass. It had changed from a roaring rapid to a placid lake. It only stays that way for a short time, so we dashed in congratulating ourselves on our developing technique. Atoll entrances can be more dramatic than you really want, so it’s nice to know that we’re able to identify the calm time.

Once inside the atoll, we turned right around a “bight” formed by a coral reef and tucked into a nice spot a little sheltered from the south wind. It’s a little bumpy-about 15 knots of wind and 2 foot wind waves, but not too bad. We’re in sand and coral. I dove the anchor to see what it looked like. It’s butted up against a big coral boulder, so we’re not going anywhere as long as the wind doesn’t shift around. On the other hand, I’m not looking forward to getting it back up, but we’ll deal with that later. Following the chain back to the boat, there are a couple of large coral formations that the chain could tangle on, so I used the new technique of “buoying” the chain so it hangs in the water floating just above the coral instead of dragging on the bottom and wrapping around the coral as we swing back and forth at anchor.

We had Mahi ceviche for lunch and Ann cooked pasta for dinner. We’ve been watching the shooting stars since after dinner. Quite a show tonight. I saw one that I thought was the moon coming through the clouds, it lasted so long. I happened to look at just the right time and though, “Wow, I didn’t know the moon was out so early”. Then the glow turned into “sparks” shooting out the side of the cloud and it burned out toward the water. Pretty dramatic. It seemed so close, I am guessing it might have been space debris. (Jerry, I’ll bet you can find if any entered the atmosphere on this day)

Tomorrow we’ll go explore the atoll (hopefully bringing back some coconuts that we can use for meals and do some snorkeling. This place is so beautiful I imagine we’ll be here a few days or longer, so we’ll likely have more to describe tomorrow.

Left Raroia for Tahanea

Position: 16 degrees, 45 minutes south; 143 degrees, 17 minutes west

We were up at 0600 because this trip is 140 miles and we needed to be out at slack water which was about 0730 (Hide slack). We need to in turn, get to Tahanea by slack water there tomorrow. After doing this one today at high tide, I think we might wait offshore for the low tide at Tahanea. They say it’s best to enter and leave the atolls on slack low water. “They” are right. We got to the pass at 0815 and there were standing waves. It was white water, but fortunately there wasn’t a lot of wind or ocean waves, so not as bad as it could have been. However, if it had been any worse, we would not have gone out. Orcinius is going with us to the same place, so we were following them out and it was quite a thrill watching them hit the standing waves and swerve back and forth with the current. There were boils all around pulling you first left, then right. Turns out, they were in awe as we went through as well. Neither boat thought of getting a picture-which probably tells you how busy we were navigating out through the crazy water. If there hadn’t been a range marker to help identify the channel, I might have gone onto the reef. The interesting thing is the white water was in the deeper channel and you had to go right through the standing waves to get out. The calm water was running over the very shallow reefs on either side. Very counter-intuitive. If you go for the calm looking water, you run aground! Past the calm looking water on either side of the pass the ocean waves were breaking on the reef, so all in all the whole experience definitely woke us up.

The rest of the day has been pretty boring. Very little wind, so we’ve been motoring as we want to make this a one day, not two day trip. Strange wind direction right now. It’s coming from the west. The predominant winds down here are easterlies. We haven’t seen a west wind since dropping below the equator. Oh well.

Dinner was (wait for it)….Mahi! This afternoon, I pulled one of the bags with four fillets out of the fridge. I cut up two fillets and made ceviche for tomorrow. It’s marinating in lime juice right now. I marinated the other two fillets in soy/teriyaki/ginger/wasabi, seared then steamed them and served over rice with the marinade poured over the whole thing. Yum, yum and yum!

Beautiful stars out now as we thread our way through multiple islands on our way to Tahanea. It’s supposed to be a stunning, “classic” South Pacific atoll and we have high hopes to spend several or more days there just playing in kayaks, trying out our standup paddleboard and snorkeling.

We’ll let you know how that goes.

We took an easy day here anchored at our first atoll. We really didn’t do too much of anything. After an easy morning-I made an omelet and lots of coffee-we inflated the dinghy, put on the outboard and went ashore. Not a lot ashore. A small town but no stores. This is mostly a town that houses pearl industry workers. A lot of this atoll is pearl farms. You can see them in the distance and every day around 1530 the workers come back from work by boat.

The best part of the day was tide pooling on the ocean side of the atoll. We walked across-about a 300 yard walk and were on the ocean side. It was low tide, so there was lots of exposed coral. Not too many seashells, but it was like a treasure hunt. Every once in a while you’d see something shining like an opal against the dull white broken coral that makes up the beach. A cowrie! They are gorgeous and we collected a dozen nice ones (with no critters inside).

The other highlight of the day was the arrival of Orcinius. It turned out they decided not to stay longer at Oa Pou but instead just headed down here. We heard them the last couple nights on Seafarers Net, so they were not unexpected. In fact we radioed them last night to set up Mahi Mahi dinner for tonight. So after our tide pooling, we got back to Charisma around 1630, changed, collected the fish and went over to Orcinius for a delightful evening. Cocktails, dinner and good conversation. What fun. Oh, and left over birthday cake – yesterday was Lisa’s birthday!

The biggest challenge for today was coming back in the dark in an inflatable dinghy among the coral. I had established a course when it was light so I had an inkling where we needed to go, but it’s still kind of eerie knowing that any moment, if you are off course, the coral could rip out the bottom of the dinghy. And we have seen sharks in this bay!

We’ve decided there’s not a lot holding us here, and there are much nicer atolls ahead, so tomorrow at first light we’re heading out for an atoll called Tahanea. It’s about 140 miles, so an overnight. Oh well, as Blue Rodeo Mark says; “Nothing’s easy”.

Position: 16 degrees, 02 minutes South; 142 degrees, 28 minutes West

Landfall!

We saw land at about 1000 this morning. Raroia. Funny thing about the Tuamotus, they are atolls so don’t have tall mountains or trees. Just coral, sand and palm trees. We didn’t see the atoll until we about 7 miles away versus any of the Marquesas which are visible for at least 20 miles if not more.

It was pretty exciting to make landfall in a new island group. It was also nerve wracking. These atolls have a reputation of being “ugly” to enter. The tide is emptying and filling through a very small gap in the coral and they can develop fearsome tides that can overpower even a strong boat engine. It’s not unheard of for an 8 foot standing wave to develop in the pass that can swamp you if you’re not careful.

So, it was with the proper amount of caution, fear and recklessness that we entered this morning. We had been slowed down a bit the last 24 hours and thus just got here at 1100, which was over an hour past our estimate of slack water on the ebb. I decided we would try it anyway and if it looked at all problematic, we’d turn right around and wait “outside” until the next slack water at around 1500.

So…we furled the jib and started the engine while about a mile offshore. I lined Charisma up on the entry. It’s about 100 yards wide between two breaking reefs so a little intimidating. Looking through the binoculars, I saw whitewater. OK, we’re not going. Well, the whitewater doesn’t look too bad, we’ll try it. No, let’s not. Yes, it’s worth a try. All this was going through my mind. I finally decided the pass was large enough that if it got hairy, we could pivot and head out. In we go. I’m carefully watching the depth sounder and knot meter. Depth to make sure we wouldn’t end up in shallow water up on the reef. Knotmeter to make sure the current wasn’t taking us on a sleigh ride. The currents have been known to exceed 8 knots around here. That’s at least a knot faster than Charisma can go under power. The good news: depth looked OK and the current looked about 2 knots and it was still ebbing (I still don’t know why. It should have been in a full on flood by then). The bad news-we were having to make at least a thirty degree correction in order to go straight. I’m right at the edge of my comfort zone, but it’s looking good. Let’s keep going. As we got to the “commitment zone” where turning around wouldn’t be an option, things were looking good. Here goes nothing!

All in all, it was virtually a non-event. A little tricky with the side current, but easily handled. No massive whitewater. Once inside, we turned right and followed the very obvious coral heads that were menacingly lining the path toward the little village where we wanted to anchor. We got a quick lesson in how to “read” the water colors for depth. Deep blue-good/deep. Light blue-OK, but get ready. Pale blue-you’re treading close, slow down and get ready to stop, it’s less than 15 feet deep. Sometimes,much less. Yellow/brown-If you see this it’s too late. This is the coral near the surface. You don’t want to see this, you’ll hit it.

After motoring along the reef about a mile, we found a nice little spot to anchor. There was a swath of sand about 100 feet long and 40 feet wide. It is surrounded by reef, some of which is breaking the surface of the water, but it’s a good anchorage if we can hit it just right. We circled twice just to get the feeling for how we were going to line up and on the third pass, slowed down. With Ann driving and me at the anchor in the bow, I directed us right up to the front of the sand where there was a large coral boulder. I signaled “stop and back”, Ann put us in reverse and I dropped anchor. It hit the sand spot on and we dragged chain back down the middle of the sand strip. The anchor dug in and we snugged up with about 40 feet to spare behind us where there is coral sticking up and breaking the surface. As we were waiting to make sure the anchor set, two fairly large black tip reef sharks cruised by to say; “hi”. We’re going to have to get used to those guys if we’re going to do any snorkeling. They are not supposed to be aggressive or dangerous, but just the look of them….

One more thing and this is more a tip to the future cruisers reading this. There is a large coral boulder about five feet high right toward the last 30 feet of our anchor chain. Usually this would be a concern as the chain might wrap around the coral and make hauling anchor very difficult without diving. BUT! We learned a new technique from an Aussie couple in Anaho Bay. You set the anchor, then pull up the last 1/3 (or whatever is appropriate) of chain and attach a float to the chain. We’re using a boat fender for the float. You set the fender/float so that it holds the chain just above the obstruction. So instead of the chain wrapping as you drift, the float lifts it up over the obstruction and there’s no entanglement. We’re in 30 feet and the coral rock is about 6 feet tall (a typical height for coral). So after setting the anchor with the usual scope, I hauled in about thirty feet, set the fender/float line for 18 feet (for margin of error) and hooked it with a SS carabiner to the chain, then let the chain back out and set the snubber. Later I dove the anchor to check the whole rig out and darned if it doesn’t look pretty good. The float is holding the chain just above the coral. It would definitely have wrapped without it. I’m pretty pleased with this new trick and will use it again. Charisma also seems to ride to anchor better with the extra “spring” that the floating chain seems to give (sort of a super catenary).

That’s our day. Tomorrow, we inflate the dinghy and go ashore to explore, then “Orcinius” gets here. We talked with them on the shortwave today and were pleased to hear they are just behind. We invited them over for Mahi dinner. They are coming and bringing the wine! Yay.

Another day in paradise.