We had a great experience here on Bora Bora this morning. We got to swim with manta rays! We anchored the dinghy in about 16 feet of water and snorkeled over this ridge in the coral and looked down into deep sapphire blue water without seeing the bottom. As we looked down through the rays of sunlight penetrating the sapphire blue depths we were able to see manta rays with about a six foot wing spans appearing out of the distance. They would circle below us, uncurl their horns and feed on the plankton rich waters. It was incredible to watch these graceful sea creatures pivot and maneuver through the water. The most we saw at one point was five all together. One stayed below us for quite a while and it was great to watch. This was a very different experience than most of our recent snorkeling in fairly shallow turquoise blue waters (4 to 20 feet deep). We will be leaving here on Saturday 1 September bound for Tonga with stops hopefully at Rarotonga in the Cook Islands and at the small island nation of Niue. Both of these last two have fairly small anchorages so we may have to pass them by if there is no space in the harbors, so we are not sure exactly when our next internet opportunity will be but will keep you all posted. Cook Islands are about 5 days from Bora Bora and Tonga is a total of 10-11 days from Bora Bora.
If you would like to see more photos of the South Pacific please check out the web sites of two of our friends, both from Seattle (www.svfelicity.com and www.layla.com). Felicity did the Baja Ha-Ha with us last fall and their friends on Layla arrived in Mexico in February after we had left; both have great web sites with lots of great photos of their experiences. While we have not been together the entire time, we have visited many of the same places and had similar experiences. We may be in some of Felicity’s shots from the Ha-Ha and Sea of Cortez and perhaps in some of Layla’s from Fatu Hiva but we have not had the chance to fully explore their web sites yet ourselves. We will continue to send photos of some of our adventures.
Parahi – Paul and Suzette
Fatu Hiva, what an incredibly beautiful landfall. The deep blue bay surrounded by high pinnacles spires thrust up out of the coconut palms. No wonder the native islanders originally named the place Baie de Verge (Penis Bay), but it didn’t take the Catholic priests long to change the name to Baie des Vierge (Virgin’s Bay). This was the kind of place that made the 3,035 mile trek from the Galapagos worth it. We made the crossing from the Galapagos to the Marquises in 20 days, 16 hours which we feel was very respectable for a 35 foot boat. We actually had to slow down about sunrise on the last day or we would have arrived in the middle of the night. We were both pleased with how quickly the journey seemed to go and never found it strange to be out of the sight of land for so long, in fact out of sight of anything as we did not see any ships or other boats for the whole crossing. We do wonder, however, where the birds come from that we saw in the middle of the ocean. It was a fairly uneventful crossing and we had no major breakdowns or gear failures (knock on wood).
We have been counting up the miles and so far we figure we have gone approximately 10,000 miles (Seattle through the Marquises). We added a few extra miles by going to Panama as it so far to the east (Panama is actually east of Miami, Florida). In fact when we were looking things up in the book on world cruising routes we found that the mileage from Panama to the Marquises is actually about 200 miles more (about 3,800 miles total) than the mileage directly from Seattle to the Marquises (about 3,600).
Altair spent almost six weeks in the many beautiful anchorages of Fatu Hiva, Tahuata, Hiva Oa, Ua Pou and Nuka Hiva. The Marquises were a great place to begin our South Pacific adventure as the islands have an incredible dramatic beauty with towering peaks and the anchorages were easy to enter. Everywhere we found very friendly people and great bread, we quickly acquired a two-baguettes-a-day habit that will be hard to break when we leave French Polynesia. Fruit was very abundant in the Marquises and we were able to get lots of fresh fruit either free or for trade. Because it seems like everyone has their own trees you hardly ever see fruit for sale in the stores. It was always important to ask before picking as all the fruit belongs to someone, even fruit that has fallen on the ground, but people always seemed willing to share. On a trip around the Hiva Oa we aquired a stalk of bananas that had about two hundred bananas on it. We shared quite a few bananas with other boats in the anchorage and still were a bit overwhelmed. Pamplemouse was a real treat and quickly became one of our favorites. It is a large sweet grapefruit that grows everywhere, wonderful unique flavor, hard to describe. Tried some pamplemouse juice but it was not nearly as good. Excellent mangos as well but some of the locals could not understand why Paul wanted to eat the greener ones.
We found the people of the Marquises very friendly and generous and eager to trade their goods and crafts for perfume, CD’s and 22 shells (which of course you are not supposed to have on your boat). There are many wild goats and boars on the islands which are still hunted with spears as 22 shells are expensive and hard tome come by. A box of 22 cartridges that would cost about $5.00 in Mexico is about $50.00 in the Marquises. If you did have 22 shells, they were as good as gold.
There are many fine artisans in the Marquises and we procured several pieces for our art collection including fine examples of wood carving, tapa cloth and bone carving. The wood carving is a stylized paddle/war club and we are still working on finding the appropriate home for it in the boat. Fatu Hiva was home to some really amazing carvers and everyone was finishing their major pieces up for an exhibition in Papeete that started the first of June. The things we saw in Fatu Hiva were really amazing but we were a bit disappointed as due to the timing of the exhibition we were not able to see any of the wood carvers on the other islands.
Our piece of tapa has a wonderful design of a turtle on it which is one of the important figures in the Marquises. We actually had the chance to make a piece of tapa cloth when we were on Ua Pou. You take the inside bark from a tree and pound it on a rock with a stick about two inches in diameter, folding it over on itself as it becomes bigger. Our pieces were both a bit on the “lacy” side and have a few holes as it takes quite a bit of skill to make pieces that are actually like a piece of fabric. But it was fun to have the chance to try our own hand at making tapa. Paul was looking for a fish hook carved out of bone and we were not finding any so we had a bone carver make one up for him. We left and came back two days later and were very pleased with the results, very unique and we have had lots of great comments on it. Though many of our friends got tattoos, we elected to leave with only the scars from a few bug bites as body marks. Some of the tattoos are really awesome and will be impressive lifetime memories for our friends. But if you were going to get a tattoo, this would certainly be the place to do so.
Food here is somewhat expensive, except for some subsidized items like baguettes at about 35 cents, and we have been surprised to find many Safeway brands in the stores here. It is a good thing that baguettes are inexpensive here as they have replaced cereal as our breakfast mainstay, as cereal runs about $5-$8 a box!!! Skippy Peanut Butter is about $7 a jar. But the scenery is so incredible that you forget how expensive the food is. It is also nice that you do not have to pay any port fees like you do in other places like Mexico so we guess it all balances out. Nuka Hiva had a great Saturday morning market, even if it did start at 4:30 in the morning. We never made it in quite that early but there were good veggies at fairly reasonable prices (but $4 for a cabbage!) and a woman that sold the most wonderful French pastries and small quiches. It seemed almost out of context to find these delicate pastries being sold next to fish being cleaned on the concrete wharf. The place was totally alive with people at this early hour of the morning and everyone was gone before 7:00 a.m.
We have been pleasantly surprised with the quality of the snorkeling. Anaho Bay on Nuke Hiva had some of the most incredible coral formations that we have ever seen, both in terms of quality and especially diversity. Many species we had never seen before. In the bay at Anaho we were also treated to the magnificent beauty of a manta ray flying through the anchorage. It was so interesting so see how it uses his horns to funnel the plankton towards its’ mouth. We have also seen a wide variety of colorful tropical fish including a lion fish.
We finally caught a nice four foot plus mahi mahi with the new lure that Paul got in Hiva Oa. It was nice that the fish hit just as we were entering the main bay on Nuka Hiva so we were able to anchor before we had to kill and clean him. Much easier to do at anchor and now we have the routine down to be able to do this under way keeping the fish blood and guts on the sailing gear to a minimum. This Mahi was excellent and we easily had seven meals for two that we thoroughly enjoyed and shared with friends. This was the first fish we had caught since Mexico even though we trolled all the way from Panama. We did have several strikes on the passage across but they only seemed to eat the lures or straighten out the hooks. Paul actually got quite creative with making his own lures using cut up coke cans and granola bar wrappers for shiny bits.
We have started to do our own laundry in buckets instead of using Laundromats or wash and fold services. One reason is that you can’t find them on the smaller islands and if you do they are very expensive. We have the routine down to a science now and as long as there is a good spigot on shore with unlimited water it really does not seem so bad. It frequently turns into a social gathering with several boats doing wash at the same time. We have found that liquid laundry detergent is best as it dissolves in the cold water better and Clorox has become our best friend.
We had heard wonderful things about the five spires on Ua Pou, they appear on the 500 CFP note, but are frequently hidden by clouds. One stormy morning we were actually able to see them all which was a real treat. It was fun to stop at Daniel’s Bay which has been a cruiser stop for years. We made our pilgrimage into to see Daniel and his wife to get water and sign their guest book. Paul had read about this bay for years and it was fun to actually get to visit. We also took a hike up to one of the highest waterfalls in the world here, a very impressive sight, and one rainy morning counted over 30 waterfalls coming down the hills where generally you saw none. We also traded for fruit with one of the descendants of one of the Marquisesan kings of Nuka Hiva, a truly impressive man with a great necklace of boar teeth.
One of our most special moments in the Marquises came on Ua Pou when we met up with a group of students at the local middle/high school in Hakahau. The kids here go to school in their own town for grades 1-3, then off to the main town on each island for the next eight years of boarding school. They then go to Papeete for three years to do high school. So the kids spend quite a bit of time away from their families. We met this group of boys when we were looking for some local wood carvers on a Saturday morning. Found them under their dormitories working on various carving projects in wood and bone, nice to see the artisan skills being passed down to the current generations. We asked if there was any dance presentations that might be happening and they said none that they knew of but offered to do a haka for us, this is the dance done by the men in Polynesia. So as they set up we went off to town to round up some friends that we knew were ashore. The kids did a great job, some of the younger ones being a bit self conscious, but others were better than some of the professionals we have seen later along the way. A few weeks later when we were in Hakamii on the other side of the island, a young man (Cedric) recognized us and said he had danced a haka for us, he was home for summer vacation. It was fun to see him again and to get a chance to visit in his town.
We departed Hakamaii on Ua Pou in the Marquises a day earlier than expected because of a Tsunami threat/warning. We were informed by friends on the radio and by the local gendarmerie that an earthquake in Peru had raised the possibilities of a tidal wave in the islands. All boats in the major ports were asked to leave the harbor and move eight miles off shore for the night. Though there was a US Coast Guard report that said there was no danger, we decided it was prudent to leave the beautiful anchorage. Rather than standing off shore for the night and returning to attend church the next morning, we reluctantly decided to sail on to the Tuamotus. We were sorry we missed our new friends at church the next morning and disappointed as we had wanted to give some things to Cedric. Fortunately there was no tidal wave that night. The passage to Fakarave in the Tuamotus is approximately 500 miles, which we covered in three and a half days.
Route taken in the Marquises for those following on their maps and atlases:
Paul and Suzette
S/V Altair