Atoll Life

The reward for our three day passage was anchoring in the clear, clear waters of the atoll Kauehi in the Tuamotus.  But just anchoring has it's hazards.  First it is important to see and avoid the coral reefs and "bommies", which are individual coral heads.

Next, it is important to lay out your anchor chain so that it will not wrap around the bommies.  

Yeah, right!

If you get it right, you can see your boat's shadow on the sand bottom 25 feet down.

The Tuamotu atolls are the polar opposite from the Marquesas Islands.  No mountains, no waterfalls, no jungle here.  Just sand, coral and palms.

Speakeasy

Every village in French Polynesia has a prominent church in the center of town.  

The city pier is where we began our exploration of the village with friends Mark and Deanna Roozendahl of the catamaran Speakeasy.  

We met them at West Marine in San Diego while waiting in line for the 2014 Baja Ha-Ha kickoff costume party.  They were cats, since Speakeasy is a catamaran.

Mark and Dee on the right.

We were the cow herd from Moooooooonshadow.  Somehow we instantly knew we'd be long time friends.

2014 Baja Ha-Ha party

Since then, we've seen them all over Mexico and now throughout the Marquesas and the Tuamotus. We've been "buddy boating" which means we're often traveling between anchorages and on the radio together.  This has been especially beneficial in the bommie filled lagoons of the atolls.  

We also pal around together on shore hikes and explorations.  This means we also trade photos, so some of the shots on our blog posts have come from the Speakeasy (and visa-versa).  We will soon part ways but will always have the memories, and full expectations that we'll run into Mark and Dee along life's paths.

Every day on the water is like a snowflake:  Completely unique and full of surprises.

Sometimes you have to pinch yourself to realize 

you are not in some dream in the land of postcard photos.

When you hang out with buddies, there are more shots with people in them!

Photo by Mark

The water in these lagoons is amazingly clear.  We can preview the day's snorkeling adventures with the paddle-boards.  This looks like a good spot!

Speakeasy's launch is a 13 footer with extra large tubes.  That means you need some manly skills to get back into the boat.  

The sea life here is just beautiful...

...so are the fish!  

There's plenty to explore

One night we had sundowners on the beach with 

pot-luck munchies all spread out on the driftwood.

On another night we had drinks at the swim-up-bar, which sometimes doubles as a paddle-board.

Sunset from the swim-up-bar.

From the village at the north end of Kauehi, we moved to the south end of the atoll 

where the amazing beauty of these atolls was on full display.

Here, the weather can be raging at sea, but we, just a few hundred yards from the open ocean,

 are protected by the reefs and the motus (small islands) of the atoll.

There is no shortage of magazine cover photo ops.

Friends from several of the yachts anchored here got together on the beach for a bonfire barbecue.  Lifelong friendships can be found at such events...

...and when you have friends, the first thing you do is try to crush them at bocci ball.  

Sometimes it works out the other way 'round!

Down here, we were reminded that the lagoon we're swimming in is actually someone else's domain.

Black tip reef shark.  About four feet long.

Finally after a week in the lagoon of Kauehi, we arose at dawn so we could navigate through the pass during the slack tide, then make our way on to Fakarava, another atoll some 34 miles away.  

The Rest of the Marquesas

Internet in the South Pacific is very much a hit or miss proposition, with a lot more misses than hits.  As a result, this post covering parts of the Marquesas is out of sequence because though we had the experiences and the photos to prove it, we had no way to upload so many gigabytes of photos until arriving at the Tuamotu atoll called Fakarava.  Here internet is available to those willing to pack up their computer and hike to the home of Stephanie and Aldric who run Fakarava Services.  Buy some of the most delicious juice in the world and you receive free internet sitting on a couch on their front porch.  But before all this, while aboard Moonshadow using our sat phone connection, we were able to post a brief update of our passage from the Marquesas to the Tuamotus .  So things are a bit mixed up, and we’re sorry, but also expect more of this in the months to come.

So we arrived at Hakatea Bay, better known as Daniel’s Bay on Nuku Hiva.  This place was once the site for a season of the TV reality show “Survivor”, but that’s not the reason to visit.  

John remembers this bay on his 1971 visit when Daniel, a descendant from the ancient chief of the valley, lived here.  On that visit Daniel and his family greeted the crew, provided us food, and arranged a game of soccer before guiding us up the valley for a look at the 2000 foot waterfall.

When we dropped the anchore here we found ourselves in some pretty fast company, all part of the 2016 Pacific Puddle Jump, all departing from Mexico at the same time.  Besides that, what all these boats have in common is that they are the result of designers who set out to create fast, save passage-makers that can easily be handled by two.

Cinnabar, Tom and Sylvia's gorgeous Schumacher 52.

Impulsive, Morris and Debbie's Outbound 44 is also a Schumacher design.

Scoots, an Able Apogee 50 designed by Chuck Paine and owned by Eric and Vandy Schrader.

And of course, the Deerfoot 62 Moonshadow by Steve Dashew.  We're particularly fond of her.

But the main reason to come here is the magical valley of immense proportions and grandeur.  John was very happy to find that except a few new structures, the valley has not changed much in the 45 years since his last time here. 

We were able to navigate our dinghy up the bit of deep water that remained over the bar at low tide...

...and follow it up the valley...

...until we found a safe place to tie her for a while.

With cruising buddies Mark and Deanna, a two hour hike took us through dense jungle...

...across the river...

...several times...

...through the ancient ruins of what was once a thriving city...

...until we finally got a glimpse of the very high waterfall.

There were more river crossings...

...and then we began to hear the thunder of the waterfall impacting the riverbed.

The waterfall is too high to see in its entirety.  At the base we could only see the last hundred feet as it continued in its relentless carving of a deep crevasse into the Marquesan hillside.

The pool at its base was cool, but not clear.  Mud from 2000 feet above was carried down to the valley.

It's important not to scream like a girl when entering the cool cool water .

Everywhere you look the proportions seem just out of scale with any normal place.  It is an immense valley with walls that seem to go up forever.

On our way back to Taiohae, our approach showed why this is the most populous village in the Marquesas.  The valley with it's surrounding high ridges is huge.

As the largest village, it gets frequent visits by the inter island ferry/cargo vessels

And frequent visits by these small rubber boats too!

It's fun to come ashore in the big city...

...where they have stores full of food!

Taiohae also has a Friday night happy hour/dinner for cruisers.  We arrived an hour early so visited the Pearl Resort for some refreshments...

...and a chance to take in the view of lovely Taiohae Bay.

Our next stop was Oa Pou with it's strange stone spires jutting into the sky

You can always spot a village by looking for a church spire reaching above the treetops.

You can visit Ua Pou by airplane, but this runway is not for the faint of heart.  This is a one-way airstrip with no option for a go-around when landing.  Then takeoff is a downhill/downwind affair straight out over the ocean.

Ua Pou was our launching point for the voyage to the Tuamotus atolls.

Hello Tuamotus

Sailing to the atolls in the Tuamotus is like going to a Broadway play.  Show up late and you can't get in.  Show up early and you will get in, but you must wait to be seated.

Our forecasts promised three days of sailing in 15 knot trade winds on an easy broad reach with light seas.  Piece of cake!  That's just what we enjoyed for the whole first day and it was a pure delight.  In fact we were going so fast, we worried about showing up way too early.   But for now things were just too good to get really worked up about an arrival still over two days away.  Besides, we had more important things to concern ourselves with.  Like another beautiful tropical sunset.

But by midnight, we had squalls around us that changed everything.  Squalls can produce heavy winds, but it really depends on where you are in relation to the cloud.  In our case, we were on the back side of the squall where the wind dropped to nothing.  So we motored.  For seven hours.  It seems our squall was traveling to Kauehi along with Moonshadow.  Now it looked like we were going to be late for Act I.

The second day we finally got some wind, but soon, it backed from East to East-Northeast, then to Northeast, then to North-Northeast.  Now the wind was at our back, and that isn't as good as the well intentioned saying "May the Wind Always Be At Your Back" sounds.  So we found ourselves motoring again.  This time for about 15 hours.  Oddly, we later learned that our friends aboard Speakeasy, fifty miles behind Moonshadow, were finding themselves on the windy side of their own squalls and using them to make good time.

"Hey, this beer isn't very cold!"  Squalls, schmalls, those are words that put the fear of God into any sailor's heart.  Somehow boat refrigerators know.  They can go months without a hiccup, but whenever you fill the fridge with food for a long passage, just like clockwork the damn thing will go out on strike.  Sure enough, Deb reported those dreaded words and we thought we were doomed to throwing out a whole freezer full of expensive Costco steaks.  We know the drill though.  Deb started making bags of ice while John went in search of some some easy "Ah HA!" discovery that would put things right.  

All the usual suspects turned out not to have a role in the refer's hissy fit, but soon McGiver found the smoking gun.  Literally.

We still don't know why this type of connection was used in the first place, or why it worked for so long, then burned up, but soon the bad stuff was cut away and replaced and we were back to cooling beer.  And back to thinking about all that other scary stuff like reefs and squalls.

The third morning we had clearing sky ahead and ugly black weather behind us.  This time the weather slowly receded behind us and our wind clocked around back to East so we found ourselves reaching at nine knots with the GPS estimating our arrival just about on time or a tad early.  This new wind and terrific sailing lasted all day and into the evening, by which time it looked like we were going to arrive several hours early so just after dinner we put a double reef in the main to slow down.

Reef, schmeef.  We showed up early.  Five hours early.  We had to kill time.  Our waiting room was the nine mile wide channel between Kauehi and Raraka, the atoll to the south.  It was 0300 and it was pitch black.  The moon had set and there was a heavy blanket of thick wet clouds.  You had to stare into the blackness for a long while just to make out the horizon.

With atolls less than five miles away both port and starboard, we hove-to.  "Heaving-to" is a maneuver with the jib or staysail sheeted to windward and the wheel hard over which effectively results in the boat being parked with the sails up.  The boat can't tack because the jib is backwinded; can't bear away because the wheel is hard over; and can't proceed forward because the backwinded jib is like holding your foot on the breaks.  

When we heave-to in the open ocean, for all practical purposes Moonshadow is stopped, but the reality is you are never really stopped on a boat at sea.  Soon the chart-plotter confirmed that we were slowly getting closer to Raraka.  Knowing that out there somewhere fairly close is a reef with crashing waves that you won't see till you are in the surf makes the hair on your neck stand on end.  After an hour and a half, we tacked and hove-to again so we'd drift back to the center of the channel.  Finally in the growing light we could make out palm trees growing on the motus (small sand islands) on the coral reefs both port and starboard.

When daylight was finally upon us we noticed some very dark clouds in the Eastern sky to windward of our position in the channel.  As we discussed when we should begin motoring to the lagoon entrance, still about 10 miles off, we found ourselves in driving rain, 37 knots of wind, and very poor visibility.  No longer able to see the atolls, we finally rolled up the staysail and motored with the double reefed main over to the Kauehi lagoon pass, watching our radar and chart plotter.

This squall followed Moonshadow for the next three hours all the way to the pass, through the pass and into the lagoon and finally eight miles or so across the lagoon to our anchorage.  

If squalls were named by the weather service like big storms, it would be called "Moonshadow"

For all the worrying about arriving at just the right time, navigating the pass was really no big deal.  By comparing our GPS speed over the bottom with our water speed, we couldn't recognize any current, and saw no disturbed water. 

For what was advertised as an easy three day sail, this turned out to be more of a trial.  So with no sleep for 24 hours, when we finally had the anchor down it was off to bed.  In the flat, calm waters of the lagoon we spent the afternoon listening to rain showers pelt the deck overhead, and dozing on a boat that was finally still for the first time since leaving the marina in La Cruz, Mexico.

Moonshadow on Passage (again)

Goodbye Marquesas!

Today, Moonshadow began what will be a passage of exactly three days. And this is a passage with a unique challenge for her crew: Keep the speed down! That's because our goal is not just a daylight arrival, but an arrival at the pass on the island of Kauehi at slack tide.

Kauehi is one of 78 islands in the Tuamotu group of French Polynesia, all of them are atolls. They're called that because you can't see them at all. These islands are nothing more than a ring of coral with a lagoon in the middle. Usually there are sand islands on the coral, but they seldom extend all the way round the atoll, so there are patches which are just at or below the surface, virtually impossible to see. Many, many ships and yachts have found their way onto these coral reefs, including a boat named Morning Dove, which was among the group of boats that sailed here from Mexico with Moonshadow. Her crew was rescued by helicopter from Papeete, but the boat may be a total loss.

Some of the atolls have a break in the coral ring called a pass, which provides entrance to the lagoon within. The passes are notorious for having very strong currents because, although the tide only rises and falls a few feet in this part of the world, all of the water in the lagoon must flow through the pass. Currents can be in excess of 6 knots, and make standing waves, small whirl pools and look really scary. Well that's what we're reading, anyway. So the strategy is to arrive exactly at the time for "slack tide", a period as short as a half hour when the current is minimal, so safe navigation through the pass is possible. Some islands, like Kauehi have wide deep passes, and some are narrow and shallow, even twisty, making them "tricky". We'll take on Kauehi first and see how we go.

But there are two critical parts of this passage that we need to pull off: We will have to slow Moonshadow down so we don't arrive before daylight, and then arrive at the pass on the southwest side of the island a bit before slack tide (10:30 AM local) so we can wait for the perfect opportunity to navigate through and into the lagoon. Then, the only challenge will be avoiding the bommies. Bommies are coral heads that reach up to the surface or just below. They are most visible with the sun overhead and behind. This is why we put steps up the mast to the first spreader where one of us will perch as lookout.

The wind and sea conditions are perfect. In fact, too good. Moonshadow is sailing at 8-9 knots which is great, but that speed will bring us to the atolls before daylight on Friday morning. That's Friday the thirteenth by the way. So at some point we'll need to throttle Moonshadow back a bit, but not now, this is too fun.

At 0330 zulu (5:30 PM local time)
10 degrees, 3.6 min South
140 degrees, 41.6 minutes West

Distance travelled 55 miles
Distance to go 449 miles

All is well aboard Moonshadow

Cheers,

John and Deb Rogers
SV Moonshadow
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