French Polynesia

Well, Tahiti is everything you have read in the travel guides.  They really do dance like you expect them too as we discovered when we went ashore at Faaa (er, yes there ARE 3 a's in that word and you have to pronounce each one separately!)  We heard drumming at a million miles an hour coming from the hotel on the beach and went ashore to find ourselves in the middle of a $50 a head dinner - but the maitre d' was happy to let us grab an empty table (of which there were very few) and stay to watch the dancing in exchange for buying the odd drink.  We had seen young men and women practising dancing in the outlying islands wearing jeans and t-shirts mostly.  Now they were in their grass skirts and exotic head dresses.  For the girls that seems to require incredibly fast hip movements combined with keeping the head and shoulders completely still.  For me, lost at the back of the restaurant that was less interesting than you might imagine since ALL I could see was there heads and shoulders! (not quite!).  Meanwhile the guys are performing more manly manoeuvres involving posturing, grimacing and leaping a lot (reminiscent of the All-blacks before a rugby match but more friendly.)

Tahiti is a volcanic island that grew a fringing reef and which has now begun to sink slowly back, leaving a deep water channel around most of the island where you can anchor and be protected from the ocean swell.  If you choose to, though yachts can anchor stern on to the promenade that borders the harbour in Papeete (pronounced Pa-pe-yeti).  The whole affect is like being back in the South of France with everything from 200 foot mega-yachts to tatty cruising boats (some with "a vendre" written on them) parked side by side, each with a boarding ladder from the transom to the concrete embankment.  The Polynesians, like the French spend a lot of time on Sundays and in the evenings promenading along the waterfront gazing at the yachts and occasionally stopping to point out some idiosyncrasy that takes their attention. The embankment, I should say runs between the main street with its pearl shops and expensive fashion emporia and the sea and every night it is taken over by "trucks" which are mobile fast food stalls where you can sit and eat any food from Japanese Sushi to Chinese or Italian food and watch the locals watching you.

We spent some time anchored a bit further around the island  - actually just under the flight path of the airport.  That was for the simple reason that it is as far as we got before the gearbox self-destructed.  Fortunately Suzy was back in the UK and could bring us all we needed for repairs.  This delayed our leaving date as it took a while to rebuild but the good news was that we could do the repairs in situ since I could build a small water-tight box around the gearbox (which is mounted through the hull) In this way, when we unbolted the box and removed it the ocean swam into the little water-tight box (along with a baby octopus) but didn't flood into the boat itself - cunning I think you will agree.

So after some enforced delays in Tahiti which we did our best to alleviate with swimming on the barrier reef and seeing a host of beautiful coral and fish we were of the Moorea, the island just a few miles to the west which we had watched the sun set behind from our anchorage by the airport.

In Moorea (don't forget to pronounce every vowel - an American we know suggested that the Polynesians must have gone to Russia and stolen all the vowels as the language only uses about three consonants) as I was saying, in Moorea there is a VERY expensive hotel ($500 per night!) Luckily for the cruisers who visit the bay the hotel visitors get taken on snorkelling trips to see the stingrays that swim near by and (as the hotel feeds the rays to keep them on hand) we got to swim with a whole school of rays.  They are not as beautiful as the independent-minded leopard ray that swum every day under our keel at anchor, but there were so many of them and you could hand-feed them if you wanted too (their mouths are all woofly and soft)

From Moorea to Tahaa was an overnight sail and we arrived at dawn in about 25 knots of wind.  The seas were up to 12 feet high and the pass through the coral - which happened to be on the windward side - was a bit worrying for a while with huge curling breakers either side.  But happily, John off a South African boat, Ferdinand, came out in his inflatable dinghy and shepherded us in.  At times he was lost to sight amongst the waves and this was all the more hair-raising as he'd brought his children (Ryan is 12 and Laurie is 10) with him.  But as is so often the case with children they thought it was GREAT fun.  Later Sally and I dived in the pass and were swept along by a good incoming current as we held on to the dinghy and "drift-dived" over the coral.  We saw some big fish we hadn't ever seen before - but no sharks.

Talking off big fish, we are now on our way from Polynesia to the Cook Islands (about 600 miles) and another yacht, Rabelais,  we are sailing with called yesterday on the radio to say they'd just caught a 50 pound dorado.  It was as long as Steve the guy who hooked it and as big as a wind-surfer, he said.  After two hours cleaning it and cutting it into steaks the after deck of their boat looked like the scene of a chain-saw massacre, he told me!  Then they had to run their engine for 4 hours to chill the fridge as they now have 27 pounds of fish to keep fresh.  Guess what we'll be eating when we catch up with them in Rarotonga, where we hope to be on Sunday or Monday.

As a final note, the reason I say "hope to be" is that the GPS system which we use for navigating is due to have its own Year-2000 crisis this Saturday (21st August) at midnight GMT so we may have to rely on older and more forgotten techniques like sextants and things to make our landfall!

Seriously though most of these islands are visible for twenty or thirty miles so don't worry too much.  It's just one of those things and the up-side of it is that for the last year (yes we left a year ago yesterday) we've been able to forget about navigation and simply ask the little black box on the chart table where we were and when we would arrive.  So we shouldn't complain!

More when we get into the Cook Islands, meanwhile I'll get back to my "teach yourself Astro Navigation" book.

Peter, Sally Suzy and Sophie

20th August 1999 300 miles from Bora-Bora.