Tahiti, Moorea to Bora Bora

We tied up at the town quay, safe and sound!  Now we have to go about fixing Interlude.  It ended up that there was only 1 facility that could do our work, at least in our timeline.  The yard, Technimarine has a great reputation, so we were happy.  So now we have a plan and we are in Tahiti after all. 

They have an annual festival called Heiva:  we went to a night of the dance and chanting competition,  to a sports day, with activities such as javeline throwing, coconut husking and rock lifting! 

40 kg No Problem right?

 


Just aim for the coconut on a pole 100 feet away?

 

Even cruisers tried the traditional dancing

We took two days to tour the island, which was nice.  Most of the time you are at water level, pretty, but not spectacular, the highlights would be the waterfalls, view from Belvedere and for Cheryl the size of the fiddleheads!   We spent a day doing a walking tour to Papeete, which was a good deal of fun. 

Other than that we have been walking the town, going from hardware store to hardware store, chandlery to chandlery.  And eating some amazing food.  Somerset found an awesome restaurant that we have greatly enjoyed.  They have Roulettes, which is a chip truck on steroids, and they have a great range of food.  Cheryl came up with the best meal so far, a crepe with potato, sour cream and bacon!

We have been on the town quai three times now.  The location is great, right in the heart of Papeete.  As always life is interesting, we took out our below deck showers many years ago as it brings in too much humidity to the boat.  This really is normal for most warm weather boats and then you shower on the stern or in our case on the side of the boat.  Most people shower, in privacy, behind closed doors.  We shower on our deck, which is fine in an anchorage, but now we are in downtown Papeete, beside the boardwalk, showering in our cockpit!

We also spent time on a mooring ball at Taina marina.  You have an amazing view of Morea every morning and evening!  And great provisioning right around the corner, as there is a large Carrefour in walking distance.

We were hauled on Tuesday, with a scheduled splash time of Friday.  As is usually the case thing don’t always go quite according to plan.  They are putting the new anchor sprit on on Friday when they realize that they had not finished the bottom side.  So we were there for the weekend, as they don’t work on weekends!  On the Monday they have the anchor sprit ready and put on!  Now you have to reattach the forestay and it is blowing 30 knots!  There is such a curve in the forestay, due to the wind, so that there is no way of attaching it.  So they move us so we are facing down wind and it was much easier.  At 4pm they put in the 5200, which then needs to dry before we can test the windlass for alignment.  So we stay in the sling overnight and are launched by 7:15 the next morning!  This was the first time we were on the hard in winter, a much nicer experience than the heat you get in the summer.  And the view left little to be desired!

We head off to the town quai, again, to clean the boat as a yard is never a clean place and the water is a fixed charge.  Then onto a mooring at Taina Marina. 

As Karen was trying to wire the deck level running lights she noticed that a weld was missing on our new anchor sprit!  She takes pictures and sends off an email.  On Monday she calls the yard owner, no problem, will take an hour to fix.  So we let go of the mooring and head the 10 miles to the haul out.  They put us in the big boat haul out, put a barge in front of us as a work platform and do the weld, in just over 4 hours!!

We go back to the mooring at Taina Marina, to enjoy our view again.  Then back to the town quai as we have someone who is going to look at our SSB.  We can transmit 100 miles, or 1000 miles, but not inbetween!   So they fix a few connections and now we can only tune on the 2, 4 and 6 meg frequencies!!  We decide to move the tuner, that part of our installation is the problem, so half a day of part shopping and half a day to reinstall the tuner and now we cannot tune at all!!  The joys of boating!

On Monday the SSB guy returns, concluded that our fixing was OK, but our tuner is dying.  Yeah, we have a plan!

Tuesday we finish with water and move to Morea.  We go to Opunohu Bay, which has an extraordinary view.  We go snorkelling with the stingrays and black tip sharks, have dinner and head out for Bora Bora, an overnight passage.

We pick up a mooring ball in Bora Bora at the Mai Kai marina, which is really a restaurant with mooring balls.  Food at the restaurant is great, we have dinner there twice and lunch once!  We bike around the island, some 30 add kilometers.  Can you say bike butt?!  Some amazing views, but not the traditional Bora Bora views as the wind is too high and the coral of the water is very different.

We did do two dives in Bora Bora.  One just outside the path, while the coral was dead (thanks to a hurricane several years ago) the fish life were plentiful and varied, not to mention the large lemon shark!  Lionfish!!  Where is my spear?   But they are not a plague here (and not large enough to eat!)  The second dive was with the giant mantas, a worthwhile experience.

We walk the town, look at pearls and ready ourselves for the next passage.

Just a bit of math.  We did 1000 nautical miles from Panama to Galapagos.  Then 3000 nm to the Marquesas.  So we should be done, right?  Marquesas to Tuomotos is another 500, Tuomotos to Society Islands is another 300.  Now we have to go 700 from Bora Bora to Suwarrow, then 500 to Somoa and another 700 from Somoa to Fiji.  Added quickly, we have another 1900nm to go this season.

Tuamotos to Tahiti

Crossing the Pacific really changes your attitude toward distance.  (This is good as we still have a long way to go this season!)  From Nuka Hiva to Kauehi in the Tuamotos is just over 500 miles.  We left with as much prep as we normally would have for a day’s sail.  Which could also be that we never ‘unpacked’ the boat as the anchorages were rolly.

While we caught several very yummy fish crossing the Pacific, the Big One had eluded us.  As we approached Kauehi we had the line in and managed to catch a 24 pound skip jack tuna!  We did it all right this time.  Karen had the reel and Cheryl was ‘handing’ in the line.  We brought the fish in 50 feet or so, then let it out, brought it in, then let it out and only brought it in on the third try.  (Yes we finally heeded the fishing advice we had been given!)  Then Cheryl held the line with the fish almost out of the water while Karen got the gaff we had yet to use.  A swing and a miss, oops.  Second time lucky.  Gaffed the fish was on board!  Cheryl was using all her weight to hold the fish down.  Karen does the “Dexter” thing and puts a knife through its skull, hopefully through the brain so it is dead.  As we are too close to the Moto to clean the fish before entering we tie it up on the engine lift and put the 5 gallon bucket under it.

 

We made the passage with Somerset.  The Tuamotos are sunken islands surrounded by a coral reef.  So there is a coral ring around relatively deep water.  Most have passages in.  The wind and currents try to force water over the edge into the Moto, the current adds and subtracts from the flow.  As most of the entries are not that large the currents can get quite strong.  Kauehi is supposed to be a good training started Moto to go into, normal current is only about 4 knots.

Cheryl drove us in very nicely.  We did a wiggle as we hit the edge of the current, an eddy, but other than that it was fine.  We had 2 knots of current against us, but a little more throttle and we were through.  We drove to the South East anchorage and put the hook down.   A sandy bottom, no swell.  Jim on Somerset had been saving a bottle of Dom Perignon to share with us and this seemed the perfect time to pop the cork. 

We were in a beautiful anchorage and we could use our champagne flutes without worrying that the rolling of the boat would spill our wine!

We got many boat projects done, to the point that Cheryl has finished everything on her list that she has parts for!  We snorkelled and did one dive.  We will be a long time learning the names of the fish, there are so many, more colourful than in the Caribbean and more plentiful.  We walked into town, which was a great day.  We walked the beach, picked coconuts off the ground, burnt garbage and had many, many awesome meals with Somerset.  More importantly the morning was started with coffee and entertainment provided by mother nature.  As we were there for 2 weeks, we became a sanctuary for small fish, which means that each morning at feeding time for the tuna and mantas we had a good deal of activity around the boat, and the birds were there to pick up the spoils.

Then one day the forecast was from the North, that would give us 4 miles or so of open water, and it was forecast to move to the west, that would be 8 miles of open water.  This was forecast to not go above 20.  We thought that we could deal with this, but by mid-morning we were in 5 foot seas, so we decided to weigh anchor and go up by the village.  Karen starts to bring the anchor up and hears a crack. She goes back to tell Cheryl (too much wind for Cheryl to hear otherwise.)  Then goes back to the bow to continue bringing up the anchor.  The bowsprit cracks completely, the delta bow roller falls into the water!  Twice Karen lifts the chain back onto the windlass, but without the bow roller to guide the chain onto it it won’t stay.  All the chain goes out, no way to stop it!  Karen takes the Bruce off the bow, walking it back to the cockpit and calls Somerset.  Carol is already lowering the dinghy; Jim is over in a flash!  Karen now drives and Cheryl and Jim weigh anchor by hand!  Sore muscles prevail but all fingers accounted for!  300 feet of chain and a 45 pound delta weighed in 5 foot seas!  And no one was hurt! 

Now what do we do?  We could go to a moto with moorings, as we can’t anchor, but really we need to get Interlude fixed, so we deciding in 5 minutes to head 300 miles instead of the 30 mile passage to the next moot that we had been planning.  The forecast is max 20 knot winds, from a variety of directions.  Sounds reasonable.    We secure the boat as we drive out of Kauehi, Trouble is still in the davits along with its engine (we normally put Trouble on the foredeck for long passages, engine on the stern railing.)  Well that night we had over 40 knots.  We had only the head sail up and it was reefed to maybe 50% and we were still doing over 8 knots, once reading 9.6 for 5 minutes!  Then the wind moved to our nose and we spent about 2 hours going 3 miles.  Then the wind shifted again and it was on our beam for most of the rest of the trip, in the 20-30 knot range.  We made our way very quickly to Tahiti and paraded back and forth in front of the harbour in flat seas until daylight, when we could enter safely!

Now we are tied up at the town quay awaiting a quote to fix the bowsprit.  It will be stainless steel, so Interlude will be stronger than ever!   On the bright side, we are in the land of baguettes and brie, with boat stores full of exciting boat parts!