21 July 2014 Pointe Tamapua, Raiatea
It was a lovely peaceful night - the wind blew steadily keeping us nice and cool. Glenys did some chores in the morning. The work surface in the galley is pure white melamine, which stains very easily. Unfortunately, she’s found that if she uses bleach to clean it, the surface reacts and turns a horrible yellow colour. I recently sent an email to the HR dealer in the UK and he’s suggested using Bicarbonate of Soda, which to our amazement seems to work, so Glenys spent a tedious hour, scrubbing the work surface, which now looks much better.
In the afternoon, we went snorkelling on the edge of the reef. There were large, two metre waves were crashing onto the outside of the reef only 20 metres away, but it was very calm where we dropped our dinghy anchor. It’s a beautiful bit of reef - the coral is in the best condition that we’ve seen in the Pacific. Glenys went off collecting shells, while I harried fish, trying to take photographs of them - they are so timid.
22 July 2014 Pointe Tamapua to Tapuamu Bay, Tahaa
We sailed up the east coast of Raiatea, which was a fabulous reach with 15 knot winds. The town dock in Uturoa is a long concrete quay, which is right in the middle of town (and free), but the wind was blowing hard directly onto the dock, so we gave it a miss.
We sailed up the west coast of Tahaa to Ilot Tautau. A couple of boats were anchored on a narrow sandy shelf just off the reef, but it’s quite exposed and the wind was blowing hard creating two foot waves, which were knocking the boats around. We ran away and anchored in Tapuamu Bay in 25 metres depth.
It’s the first time that we’ve anchored in such deep water and I was glad that I’d spent the time to splice 40 metres of ¾ inch rope onto the end of our 60 metres of chain. With 80 metres out, we have 60 metres of chain on the sea bed and 20 metres of rope to the boat - I hope that my splice is good.
After lunch, we hopped into the dinghy and motored a mile across to the small island to the south of Ilot Tautau There’s a 50 metre wide channel between the two motus, which has a snorkelling area called the Coral Gardens. We waded ashore onto the small motu and walked to the seaward side of the channel - we were in bare feet, so the stony path was a challenge.
At the far end of the island, we waded into the water and swam around the coral heads. The water is incredibly clear and the very healthy coral has created a labyrinth of narrow channels. The maximum depth of the water is six feet and at times the coral is just below the surface of the water. Local tour operators bring boat loads of tourists here and feed the fish, so all the marine life is used to people and as usual we had swarms of Pacific Double-saddled Butterflyfish around us looking for a handout.
We stayed in the water for two hours and I filled up my memory card with photographs - I got a reasonable shot of a Pacific Sailfin Tang, which looks very impressive when it extends it's fins. A couple of tourist groups went past us. One group had twenty people, all in a long line, pushing off the seabed and the coral, churning up the water as they passed. Not the greatest way of seeing a lovely reef.
The tour guides all feed the fish, which I have mixed feelings about. It obviously changes the natural behaviour of the fish, but gave us good opportunities to get very close to marine creatures. At one point, a huge Green Moray Eel (I’d say 6 foot long) swam between Glenys’s legs and then turned back straight at her. It gave her a big fright, but it was obviously used to being fed. All in all, a fabulous place to snorkel.
23 July 2014 Tapuamu Bay to Mai Tai Anchorage, Bora Bora
My splice on the anchor chain held overnight and we didn’t end up on the reef. I did a baguette run to the small store ashore and then we pulled anchor and headed for Bora Bora, 25 miles away. We had to motor for the first hour, but once we’d cleared the lee of Tahaa, we had a cracking sail on a beam reach.
We went to the Mai Tai Marina, but all moorings were taken, so we had to drop the anchor in 27 metres of water, just at the edge of the mooring field.
While making lunch, Glenys discovered that the food fridge had completely defrosted. After ten minutes of total panic, I found that it had lost its charge of refrigerant, so I topped it up and left the gauges in place to monitor the rate of refrigerant loss.
In the afternoon, we went for walk around town - finding out where the gendarmerie is and of course the supermarkets. There’s a small dinghy dock just across the road from the Super-U supermarket, which is very convenient and the store looks to have everything that we would need.
Hugh and Brenda from “Scotia” invited us over for an evening jam session, so Glenys took her ukulele and I took my guitar. John from “Kika” was there with his fiddle and both Hugh and Brenda play the guitar, so we had a cracking time.
We've now completed a quarter of our voyage around the world - we started in Grenada at a longitude of 61°45W and we’re now at 151°45W. It’s taken us just over three years to get here, but we’re starting to move a little faster now and we’ll probably get to our half way point (in Bali, Indonesia) sometime next year.
24 July 2014 Mai Tai Anchorage, Bora Bora
We went for a dive with Hugh from “Scotia” and Harry from “Malua” on a couple of wrecks. (One is at 16°31.15S 151°44.34W at a depth of 23 metres and the other is lying on a reef at 16°31.15S 151°44.26W at depths between 15 metres and the surface.) The water was a little murky because it’s at the end of a bay, but both wrecks were interesting and there’s some good fish life especially on the second one. The dive sites are 160 metres apart, so we did them as two short dives.
We chilled out in the afternoon and did nothing - we seem to have lost our motivation now that we've arrived at Bora Bora - it’s the end of French Polynesia and we've no plans other than stocking up with food and waiting for a weather window to sail to the Cook Islands.
25 July 2014 Mai Tai Anchorage, Bora Bora
Yesterday, I noticed that we have air leaks around the necks of our dive tanks, so I took off one of the valves and tried to clean up the seal and the surrounding seat. I ran the dive compressor and started to fill up the tank, but it still has an air leak.
I'm not sure what the seal is, so I called in at one of the dive shops to see if they could help me, but they were very offish and said that there was no one on the island who could inspect or repair tanks. I'm just going to leave the tanks partly filled and refill them just before we do our next dive - I'll have to get it sorted out properly in New Zealand.
On a positive note, the food fridge seems to be behaving itself and the pressure is staying steady at 10 psi - fingers crossed that we've only got a very tiny leak.
The latest GRIB files show that we’ll have north winds for a few days and then some very strong south-east winds kick in especially down in the south Cook Islands where there seems to be a wind acceleration zone created by a stationary high south of us. I guess that we’ll keep ourselves occupied over the weekend and see how it develops early next week.
In the afternoon, we hung about on the boat, Glenys pottering about with her shells, while I played with my program to display my fish photos. Now that Glenys is classifying and photographing her shell collection, I'm changing my fish application to be a more general “Collection” application so it can handle her shell collection as well. Here I am in the tropical “paradise” of Bora Bora, sat down below programming - what on earth am I thinking?
26 July 2014 Mai Tai Anchorage, Bora Bora
The anchorage turned rolly as swell came in through the pass in the strong north winds. Also there were big katabatic gusts coming down from the mountain above the anchorage, making it unpleasant. However, we decided to stay to watch a Heiva dance show in the evening.
The GRIB files still show strong 30 knot south east winds in the south Cook Islands and it will possibly cause big seas on our planned passage to the tiny Suwarrow Atoll, so we’re now considering going further north to the remote island of Penrhyn and from there heading to Samoa. We’d be doing an extra 250 miles, but I’d rather have an extra two days sailing in pleasant conditions than a shorter sail in big seas. We had a reasonable internet connection, so I spent two hours finding blogs of people who have already visted Penrhyn and it sounds like a great place.
We had dinner in one of the small, temporary restaurants set up for the Heiva. Tonight's event was the finale and seemed to be more of a cabaret put on for the tourists, who were paying $25 per seat. In typical Polynesian style, one side of the arena was not fenced off, so an hour before the event started, locals were spreading out ground sheets by the side of the arena and setting out their own chairs. We stood at the side behind them and had a great free view of the show.
27 July 2014 Mai Tai Anchorage to Motu Tupe, Bora Bora
It was a nice day, so we motored around to the east side of the island and anchored off Motu Tupe at 16°29.36S 151°42.11W. The first four miles was easy and in deep water, but the last 3 miles was a little more fraught, being very shallow. There's a south cardinal buoy where the water went from 30 metres to 3.5 metres extremely quickly and we had to do a zigzag around a red buoy to follow the recommended route in the chart.
From there on, we saw depths between 2.9 metres and 5 metres over sand with weed patches. The water is crystal clear making it difficult to judge the depth. To make matters worse the chart is incorrect and showed us going across reefs which don’t exist. We just slowed right down and eventually anchored in 3.5 metres on brilliant white sand near to a large flashy hotel with apartments built over the water.
The main reason for coming over this side of the island is to snorkel with Manta Rays tomorrow morning. So, after lunch, we jumped in the dinghy and went to check out where to go. There's a narrow channel between reefs at 16°29.39S 151°42.66W where we've been told the Mantas come to feed. We didn't see any today, but some people on a tourist boat confirmed the location was correct and that they'd seen one earlier. We had a long snorkel anyway - it’s a nice bit of reef.
28 July 2014 Manta Anchorage to Bloody Mary’s, Bora Bora
Just before eight o'clock, we went snorkelling with the Manta Rays and it was fabulous. We were there for over an hour and must have had over 30 sightings of these magnificent creatures - at one point, we had five in sight at the same time. With wing spans of 6-9 feet, the huge creatures glide through the narrow channel with slow flaps of their wings.
They have a kind of scoop at each side of their heads, which they use to help funnel plankton into their huge mouths. When this is not being used, it is rolled away and then looks like a pair of horns. Provided you keep a few metres away, they are mostly unconcerned about people and I was able to get some good shots of them close up including a view straight down the mouth of one.
By nine o'clock, the tourist and dive boats had started to arrive, so we called it a day and motored back around to the main town and across to Bloody Marys restaurant for lunch to celebrate our 34th wedding anniversary which was a couple of days ago.
This waterside restaurant used to have 8 moorings, but now there are only two - one seems to have a permanent live-aboard on it and the other mooring is poorly maintained with the spliced loop nearly worn through. Someone has tied a bowline loop in the rope below the splice, which looked okay, so I tied into that - the weather forecast is for settled conditions.
We had a lovely lunch of cheeseburger and chips washed down by a couple of pints of Hinano Amber, which is like an IPA beer. Of course, Glenys just had to finish off with a Bloody Mary. It cost us about $40 for lunch and drinks, which is very good value for French Polynesia.
We chilled out for afternoon, Glenys continued researching Penrhyn and I edited my photos of Manta Rays. I was a bit disappointed because the water was full of plankton and the colours are very muted. I edited them in Photoshop as best I could and some shots have come out okay, but I think that I should have altered the white balance on my camera before taking the photos.
29 July 2014 Bloody Mary’s to Mai Tai Marina, Bora Bora
I had a terrible night. There were big katabatic gusts screaming down from the surrounding hills and I was very worried about the dodgy mooring that we were tied to. If the mooring parted, then we probably wouldn't notice anything until we hit the reef a mile down wind - I wish that we'd anchored.
In the morning, we went back over to the main town and picked up a mooring at the Mai Tai Marina. I downloaded a GRIB file that showed that there's a band of gale force winds with lots of rain (and I guess squalls) arriving here in 3-4 days' time. The furthest north that it gets is 12 degrees south. Penrhyn is at 9 degrees south, so if we leave tomorrow, we should be 200 miles north of the bad weather when it arrives and should have pleasant 15-20 knot trade winds. We decided to go for it, otherwise we'll be trapped here for another week.
It's 590 miles from Bora Bora to Penrhyn, which will take us 4-5 days. Once we get there, we'll probably stay for a couple of weeks before sailing to Western Samoa, which will take 7 days. Penrhyn only has a supply ship visit every 3 months, so we'll probably not be able to buy any food while we're there, meaning that we need enough food and fuel to last a month.
We left our dinghy on the mooring and motored over to the fuel dock, where we were told that they'd run out of diesel, but we'd be able to get some tomorrow - bummer. We scurried back to our mooring and then whizzed into town. I went to the Gendarmerie to clear out, while Glenys nipped to the supermarket to get baguettes for lunch.
The clearance was very simple. I just had to fill in two forms and show him our passports. The officer wanted to see Glenys to confirm her identity, but when I told him that she'd gone to get baguettes, he just shrugged, said it was nearly lunchtime and gave me the clearance anyway. I then had to walk to the post office to mail a copy of the customs form back to Papeete.
After lunch, I dropped Glenys off at the supermarket then went back to the boat to do a few chores. I ran the watermaker and checked the food fridge - it seems to have held the pressure. I've no idea what happened - perhaps we’ve got a microscopic leak that has dumped the refrigerant over the past year, since we had it repaired in Jamaica. While I had the floor boards up, I gave the drinks fridge its two week top-up.
I joined Glenys in the supermarket and helped her get our two trolley loads of food and drink back to the boat. While we were passing the fuel dock, Glenys noticed that they'd removed the covers from the diesel pumps, so I went over and discovered that they now had diesel. So, after loading the shopping aboard, we dropped our mooring and went to the fuel dock, where filled up with duty free fuel.
A busy day, but by five o'clock, we had full tanks of fuel, water and at least a month's supply of food, so we're ready to go.
In the evening, we went over to happy hour and chatted to Al from "Erie II". He's called in at Penrhyn twice in the past year (going to and from Hawaii) and had a great time there. There are only 400 inhabitants on the island and it sounds like they are very friendly, inviting cruisers into their homes, taking them fishing, etc. In return, the cruisers have been giving the islanders goods that they don't have and helping them repair things. We're looking forward to getting there.
30 July 2014 Bora Bora to Penrhyn, Cook Islands (Day 1)
We were up early and I downloaded a GRIB file, which confirmed that we should be okay going to Penrhyn - the nasty strong winds should be staying well south of us. Glenys gave me a shopping list and sent me off to the supermarket to spend the last of our Polynesian Francs. Meanwhile, she started cooking food for the first couple of days at sea because we thought that it might be a bit bouncy and it'll take a couple of days for us to regain our sea legs. When I got back, I lashed the dinghy on the foredeck and made sure we were all shipshape.
We dropped the mooring at 10:30 and motored out through the pass into a very lumpy sea, with a 12 foot swell. The first couple of hours were difficult with variable winds in the lee of the island and we had to gybe the genoa a few times before the wind settled down to a constant direction.
Unfortunately, the wind was directly behind us, so I then had to spend half an hour on the rolling foredeck, rigging up the spinnaker pole and fixing the genoa out to starboard. We put a preventer on the main boom and fixed that out to port, then rolled off downwind. The wind was good with 15-22 knots across the deck, but the sea was horrible with the big 4 metre waves pushing us around.
I went to bed for a couple of hours in the afternoon and when I got up, the wind had backed 20 or 30 degrees, so we gybed the genoa and altered course onto a broad reach. There was no change by nightfall apart from the seas thankfully quieting down a little.
There was no moon, but the clouds cleared away and we had a good night with bright starlight illuminating the sea. It was very rolly and as usual, both of us found it difficult to sleep in between our three hour watches.
31 July 2014 Bora Bora to Penrhyn, Cook Islands (Day 2)
Dawn found us still on a broad reach doing 5-6 knots in 6-9 foot seas with east winds at 15-20 knots. It was sunny with fluffy white clouds - perfect trade wind sailing.
I checked into the Goodbye Isabella net (which is still going) and gave them our position. On this leg of the so called "Milk Run" across the Pacific, there are three main routes through the Cook Islands to Samoa and Tonga, 1200 miles away. Most boats take the south route through Rarotonga or the middle route through Suwarrow Atoll and only a few take the longer northern route through Penryhn. It will be interesting to monitor the weather that each route gets over the next week.
I downloaded a GRIB file and the forecast is still for gale-force winds south of 12 degrees south. There's a big high that has stalled to the south of us and it's creating a compression zone in the easterly trade winds. It also seems to be sucking the South Pacific Convergence Zone down to the southern Cook Islands bringing squalls with heavy rain and wind.
It looks like Rarotonga will have over 30 knots winds from this evening for five days; Suwarrow will have strong squalls in 2 days’ time and, hopefully the worst that we'll get will be a bit of rain and 15 knot north east winds in 3 days’ time when we’re approaching Penrhyn - fingers crossed.
The day continued to be fabulous and the seas dropped a little more, so it was idyllic sailing. We'd had such good weather during the day that I didn't even reef the main, which is our usual practise overnight.
On my 7-10 watch, I heard a bang from the aft deck and found a Red-footed Booby standing there with its wing caught on the Hydrovane adjustment rope. Using a towel to prevent the bird using its vicious looking beak on me, I managed to free its wing. It looked tired, so I decided to let it have a ride for the night - it wasn't going to go hungry because it had regurgitated half a dozen squid onto our deck (nice!)
Unfortunately, five minutes later it was stood at the back of the cockpit eyeing up a comfy cushion. Now I like having close encounters with wildlife, but sharing our cockpit with a full sized booby was too much. I tried to shoo it away onto the aft deck, but it kept coming back. I then tried to get it to go forward on to the front deck, but it was not having any of that, so I grabbed it with a towel and tossed it over board. It seemed to get the message and didn't come back.
At 0400, the wind had veered to the south east and I gybed the genoa across so that it was poled out to starboard – I'm glad that I left the spinnaker pole rigged up. Other than that we did nothing at all during the peaceful and star-lit night.
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