Tag: Tuamotus

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The UN says it’s cool

South Pass of Fakarava, Tuamotu, French Polynesia

I don’t feel like I am giving a fair scope for the distance between these islands.  I could tell you about each voyage of about 100 miles from remote isolated desert island to remote even more desolate island but really, that would get boring.  If you want to know what it’s like sailing the high seas, look at the blog entries about us crossing the Pacific Ocean to the Marquesas.  It’s like that.  FYI, my ukulele and French continue to improve and I’m learning stuff about Solomon I never knew before.

I do not wish to bore you with the details while I also do not want to deceive you that these transits are just afternoon “hops” from one island to the next.  Typically, a trip between islands typically takes a day and can take as many as 5.

The trip to Fakarava took 1 day but during that day we broke into another can of butter.

You see, Polynesians and cruisers have a similar problem: we both don’t have a ton of refrigerator space so we both minimize what needs to be put in there as much as possible.  Did you know that as long as you never refrigerate your eggs in the first place that they actually don’t require refrigeration?  Neither did I.  How about butter can be preserved for long periods of time in a can?  And that certain kinds of milk don’t need to be refrigerated until the carton is opened?  I have learned on this trip that Americans refrigerate way too much stuff.

The coral reef of Fakarava was very exciting for all of us because it the only Tuamotu to be designated a UNESCO world heritage site.  Tiffany knows more about this than me but the short of it is that the UN thinks that this place is awesome and should be preserved for it’s natural significance.  Translation: Awesome stuff here, come check it out without destroying it.

(Again, I got this off a picture of the visitor center’s map.  Don’t use this to navigate.  Buy a chart.)

The voyage in was another hair raising experience where we were stationed on the bow watching for coral heads in the perfect crystal clear blue water.  Just to add a little spice to the mix, we had currents flowing around the pass to make our lives extra interesting.  Now maybe you think after our Kauehi adventure we had relaxed about the whole sailing over a coral reef thing.  Let me point something out to you:

Narrow channel + Sharp coral reefs on both sides + lateral currents going every direction = nervous crew.

Upon completing our transit of the channel we discovered the “south pass village” that would be our home for the next few days as we indulged ourselves in figuring out just exactly what the UN thought rated this place international recognition and protection.

Also, we got invited over by one of our fellow cruising boats to experience one final taste of the Marquesas: a goat dinner.

The Marquesians raise goats to eat and they are very good at this particular skill.  A fact I learned regrettably after I had left the Marquesas…

– Greg

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Playing on a desert island

Kauehi, Tuamotu, French Polynesia

Ok it’s, uh, pretty and all.  Really, really pretty but what do you DO there?

Well all throughout the village and along the islands are coconut crabs.  Which are crabs.  That eat coconut.  They also live in little burrowed holes in the beach sand and the islanders are good at catching them for supper.

If catching your next meal gets old and/or frustrating (fast little buggers) you can always go for a swim.  Remember how I said Kauehi had clear water?  Yeah, and lagoons are breeding grounds for everything from tropical fish to coral to the most colorful clams I have ever seen.

If the lagoon gets old, you can wander down the road (“the” as in singular.  As in the only one on the island) to the other beach.  It’s not like it’s a long walk.

Since the island is an atoll surrounding a lagoon, it has beaches on both sides.  The “inside” beach has sand but no waves.  The outside beaches, which face out to the ocean, would be really great for surfing or boogie boarding except for one tiny detail.

**20100510A – archive – Kahuei beach**

Allan is really excited because he has dragged his board, sails and gear all the way from California in order to go windsurfing in the Tuamotu.   The barrier reef islands provide a good shelter from the ocean waves but are also low enough to the water to allow the wind to blow full force over the lagoons.  Big wind but no large waves creates an ideal windsurfing environment.

I know I said this before back in Mexico but it bears repeating.  Allan loaded all of this gear onto his sailboat.  He then proceeded to sail his boat from California to the middle of the South Pacific.  We have been sailing for months now to get here.  So we sail here, on a sailboat, using the wind to sail our sailboat to this lagoon and the thing Allan wants to do here?  After all that?  He wants to go sailing on a smaller sailboat…

…really?

He insists it’s different.  It goes faster or something.  Me, I know addiction when I see it.

-Greg

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Seriously, you live here?

Kauehi, Tuamotu, French Polynesia

So that’s the city sign.  Guess they don’t exactly have a city line, being as there aren’t a lot of other cities out here to butt up against.

So the semi-obvious question I left out of the previous entries (I ran out of space!)  was, “Greg, I get how the islands got there, how did the PEOPLE get there?!?”

Good question, and the short answer is…no one actually knows for sure.

Some people say they sailed from South America.  Some dude name Thor (no, really, it’s his name) sailed a raft from South America to prove this theory.  He made it to the Marquesas, so, it possible.  However, the current popular theory is that the ancient Polynesians came from Asian stock:

(thanks to httpthe.honoluluadvertiser.com)

The summary version is that the Polynesian people were beyond comprehension badasses at seagoing navigation.  They were human sextants capable of determining their exact position on the largest expanse of bleak nothingness on the planet Earth (the Pacific Ocean) by doing things such as watching the stars, checking the angle of the waves, looking at birds in flight and…no that’s it.  That’s what they did.  I am not a Polynesian.  I use a GPS because I suck with a sextant, much less reading the angle of a wave bounced off an island 100 miles away (not making this up or exaggerating here.)  So these people sailed against the current and upwind in what amounted to two canoes tied together by some wood and some sails lashed on top.  Why did they sail against the wind and current?  So that if, while exploring, they failed to find any land, they could easily get pushed back home once all the food and water was used up onboard.  Doesn’t that just sound swell?  Well it sure did to them because they got really, really good at it.  Therein how they found, charted and settled all these islands long before we Europeans with our clunky tall ships (and syphilis!  Let’s not forget what we brought to share!) showed up on the scene.

As for Kauehi city, well, city is a generous term.  Here’s me in the center of town, which also doubles for their beach:

They have a “store” (it may one day grow up to be a 7-11) where they sold baguettes!

Our elation at being able to resupply our junkie fix for awesome fresh French bread was short lived when we found out that the baguettes were frozen.  It did lead us to wonder though: are they frozen because they got shipped here?  Or do they just turn on the bread baking over once a month to save energy?  Unfortunately my limited French skills did not cover such complex topics of conversation.  I did manage to find ice cream though.  Hey, if they can freeze bread they can have ice cream.  More importantly, I can have ice cream.

The main structure of the town is the church.  We were lucky enough to be here on a Sunday and we attended a Catholic mass in Tahitian.  Though we couldn’t understand the service, we did get to meet the entire town (maybe 100 people in total) and they were really nice to us.  Also, the percussion instrument in the choir was an Alhambra water jug.  I felt that it would be disrespectful to tape this guy playing during mass but man, WOW.  You’d be amazed how good people can get at playing an empty plastic water jug when it’s the only instrument available for 600 or so miles.

They have a dinghy dock and yacht anchorage.  The monthly resupply ship, their only semi-reliable (weather depending) means of contact with the outside world, stays offshore and sends in small tender vessels with supplies for the residents.  No exports that I am aware of or could find evidence of are taken back out to the ship.  With only 100 people on the island and about 30 yachts a year that visit, they have an almost untouched natural beauty and crystal clear blue water right up the edge of the dock.

These people LIVE here.  Perched on this tiny ring of coral in the middle of the ocean.  They fish, collect rain water to drink and they have been doing it for hundreds of years.

-Greg

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Transit of TERROR!

Entering Kauehi

Kauehi, Tuamotu, French Polynesia

And so there we were, sailing through a coral reef, hundreds of miles from any possible source of rescue, all in the name of good times.  We chose to do this, for fun, I might add.  Funny thing happens when you loose about 4 miles worth of sea depth in the span of a few feet…you get some odd wave activity.  Go figure.

After that little bit of oceanographic adventure we proceeded down what I like to call the “Transit of TERROR.”

(Yeah, just in case you are lazy enough to use a photo with PowerPoint arrows on it to steer through a reef, this is not a chart for navigation.  Exact ship track line may vary in actual practice 😉

You see, the people who settled this little oasis of land decided to found their village on the largest spit of land they could find, which makes sense being as the majority of the island’s width would not allow for an arena football field (50 yards to the uninitiated).  Downside is the spit of land is on the exact opposite side of the friggin’ lagoon from the only navigable entrance!  Remember this tropical “lagoon” is actually a ship’s minefield of jutting rocks and coral heads that hang just below the islands surface.  Just low enough to not be seen and just high enough to go though your fiberglass hull like a spear though butter.  No, not a knife, a spear.  There is a chart of the lagoon that shows where the clear water is, but yeah right, how accurate is that?  Personally, I don’t see a lot of oceanographic survey ships making regular rounds of these islands so for all we know, good ol’ Capt Cook provided this information with his lead line a few hundred years back and my guess is that the coral has grown since then.

The end result is that for the next 3 hours Allan drives the boat while the three of us peer over the bow in the vain hope that we will be able to see any uncharted rocks, shout a warning and turn the boat before we all sink.

Again…we did this for fun…really.  It was great.

In the end though, our fears were largely unfounded.  The chart was pretty accurate and by that I mean we didn’t crash into any unexpected rocks, though a few did loom frighteningly close out of the depths. (water magnifies things, FYI, makes ‘em look closer).  We got in, dropped the hook and departed to explore the village of people who call this place home.

-Greg

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Prepare for Penetration

Kauehi, Tuamotu, French Polynesia

 

 

The transit from the Marquesas to the Tuamotu was fairly uneventful.  Being the ocean crossing salty dogz (yes, with a “z”) that we are, we scoffed at the idea of a 3 day sail to the next island chain as if such paltry transiting now barely even merited our attention.  I mean, goodness we scarcely had to provision for this trip.  OK, we bought some extra baguettes and some pamplemousse but that’s basically about it.

 

Have I mentioned pamplemousse yet? Picture grapefruit…ok now picture it actually tasting really, really good.  I mean crazy good.  Like you could easily eat yourself sick on it.  Yeah, that’s pamplemousse.  They grow it out here.  It’s better than the mangoes.  Notice you don’t see any pamplemousse rotting on the ground with the mangoes…there’s a reason for that.

 

 

 

(From our friends on SV Mulan)

 

The sail across did have one interesting highlight though:

 

Yes, a spider crawled out of my armpit.  Well, fell out really.  I screamed, it died.  I screamed some more.  I’d rather not dwell on the experience.

 

The Tuamotus are in and of themselves, an interesting story.  Imagine, if you would, hundreds of square miles of open ocean a few miles deep.  Ok, now in the middle of that, stick a ring of islands that reach no higher than 3-10 feet above sea level.  It’s kind of like the Florida keys, minus the mainland nearby.   Oh, and the big lagoon in the center of each…

People live on these things.  Which is amazing, but where do the islands come from?  Well, Darwin (yes, THAT Darwin) apparently had a second theory that drew a little less fire from the Christian coalition than his evolutionary ponderings.  Darwin’s Theory of Atoll Formation states:

(from www.geocaching.com)

Stage 1: islands form from either exploding volcanoes or by the earth’s crust jutting up (like mountains) (the Marquesas are an example of stage 1)

Stage 2: coral, which is apparently just floating around the ocean looking for a place to live, latch onto these islands.  There they are supplied with a place to live that is close enough to the surface to allow for sunlight.  Coral grows around the islands and form a barrier reef.

Also during this stage the volcano goes dormant and the island starts to sink back into the ocean.  Basically, the combined weight of the large mountain jutting literally miles up from the surface of the sea floor is a bit much for the crust to take, so it sinks.  Also erosion starts to take affect.  The coral keeps growing though, so the difference between the receding island shoreline and the barrier reef becomes a protected lagoon.  (The Society Islands are an example of stage 2)

Stage 3: The island sinks below sea level, leaving a lagoon anywhere from 0 to 100 feet deep.  The coral keeps growing and forms tiny islands (or “motu” in Tahitian) made completely from the coral.  The motu grow on top of the barrier reef which is also constantly growing, so it does not sink despite the sinking of the island.  In the end the barrier reef islands are all that remain.

The islands we have just entered are examples of this final stage.

Now while that is all very well and good, lets move on the practical application portion of our little science lesson here: sailing THROUGH a coral reef in order to effectively get swallowed up by an island where you sail on an underground mountain that juts up at unidentified locations just below the water line is, shall we say, a source of some concern for the average yacht owner.  Especially when the nearest repair facility is oh, say, 700 miles away, give or take.

Well, here we go…

~Greg

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