1 - 8 June 2007  Rangiroa is the second largest atoll in the World, measuring 75km by 25km.  Although the long circuit of motu (islands) and hoa (channels) stretches more than 200km around the lagoon, there are only two sleepy villages, Avatoru and Tiputa, both of which have a channel by them large enough for supply ships to pass through.  Knowing that we were going to be able to go on land for a while, and it is relatively flat, we got the Bromptons out to enable us to explore more ashore.  We cycled to Avatoru on several occasions, a mere 10km along the island, passing small restaurants and specialist boutiques along the way.  Avatoru is a quiet village with everything you need to live there - a bakery, supermarket, fruit stall, banks, post office, medical facilities and two very large, imposing churches.  To get to Tiputa, we had to catch a water taxi from the dock near the anchorage across the pass.  The water taxi was very cheap and quick, and the local drivers knew all the quick routes across avoiding the many coral heads and obstructions.  Tiputa is even quieter than Avatoru, just having basic shops and facilities as there is little reason for tourists to go over there.  As we have found throughout French Polynesia so far, everywhere is neatly groomed, clean and festooned with flowers and colourful vegetation.

The bustling Post Office at Tiputa

During our stay we took the opportunity to complete three dives in Rangiroa, all were very different but all were fantastic!  As the currents were still quite strong, the first dive was difficult as we had to swim hard against it.  As Rangiroa is an atoll we were once again back amongst colourful coral and a plethora of reef fish.  There were areas where the coral has died due to an El Nino a couple of years ago, but it is slowly recovering.  We delayed doing the other dives until the currents had died down a bit, as we wanted to complete a drift dive through the pass, which we managed to do on our final dive.  During the first few weeks in June, Black Tipped Sharks come to the Tiputa Pass to mate.  The sharks face the incoming current, so that they can breathe without swimming forward, and are then able to concentrate on mating.  Amongst the many divers, there were camera crews from the BBC and Discovery Channel hoping to film the shark’s activities; however, I think they filmed more divers than sharks.  On one dive, the camera crews were sitting in one of the canyons that cut the pass wearing their re-breathers filming a single shark swimming around.  We swam on to the next canyon and there were lots of sharks circling.  It was as if the groups of sharks were shy and didn’t want to be filmed and so had sent the single shark to where the camera crews were to appease them!  Despite the amount of sharks, we didn’t feel worried about being so close to them and I’m sure they had other things on their minds than finding a diver for lunch.  Other than the sharks, we swam with lots of other wildlife including Dolphins, Turtles, Moray Eels, Lion Fish, Clown Fish and Stone Fish, which looked just like the coral they were sat on – if the dive master hadn’t touched the fish so that it opened its eyes we wouldn’t have believed it was real.

   A friendly turtle and a vicious looking Moray Eel

 

A Stone Fish - honest, that is a fish there!

The BBC cameramen and the sharks they were hoping to film

French Polynesia is famous for its black pearl farming and we went to Gauguin’s Pearl Farm to see how they are grown.  We had a fascinating tour and we hadn’t realized there was so much to it.  The pearl oysters are opened about 1.5cm, just enough to surgically insert a 3mm form (spherical piece of pearl shell) and a very small piece of DNA graft into its appendix where the pearls grow.  They are left for 18 months to see if the grafting has been successful; the oyster spits the form out if not!  The successful ones are then left in the sea for another 18 months for them to grow their pearls.  They are then harvested.  If a smooth, round pearl is found, the pearl is removed and a new form the same size as the pearl is inserted to fool the oyster into thinking it is still growing the original pearl.  The farm can keep growing pearls from the same oyster for about 9 years, harvesting them every 12-18 months and getting bigger pearls each time.  The colours range from pale green to purple hews through to dark greys and nearly blacks.  Gauguin’s Pearl Farm harvest around 6 million pearls a year, keeping 20% for themselves to sell; the other 80% are sent to Asia.

Freshly harvested black pearls

We were sorry to leave Rangiroa as it was just how you expected a paradise island in the South Pacific to be; white sandy beaches lined with palm trees that try to dip into the crystal clear, aquamarine water.  Where we were anchored, their were colourful fish swimming around the small coral heads, sucker fish cleaning the bottom of the boat and rays drifting past.  There were also quite a lot of things to do on the island and we will hopefully come back one day to explore more of this island and the others in the Tuamotu Islands.

Rays and sucker fish around our boat

9 - 11 June 2007  We left Rangiroa and the Tuamotu Islands with the morning tide on the 9^th June.  Negotiating the pass presented no problems and we set sail along the north coast of the atoll to then head South West for the 212 mile passage to Tahiti.  The winds were very light and the seas smooth so we sat back and enjoyed the peace and quiet of a beautiful sail.  The passage was uneventful in every way and we made our landfall on the evening of the 10^th June, 60 miles out!  A bit different from the Tuamoto’s, but Tahiti is 7000’ feet high.  We arrived off of Point Venus on Tahiti’s north coast around 2am on 11th June - Steve's Birthday.  We hove too in virtually no wind and drifted on the tide to wait for the dawn to enter the port of Pape’ete .  The entrance was easy even with the need to dodge the departing morning ferries to Moorea, and we threaded our way inside the reef past the airport to the anchorage off of the Marina Taina.  It was the first time we have ever had to ask air traffic control’s permission to cross the end of the runway in a boat! 

12 - 30 June 2007  There are a lot of boats anchored, with many more on their way.  We had been expecting a strip of land between us and the ocean, but there is only a 200m wide coral reef.  At first we were quite nervous of this, expecting the waves to come over the top and for the anchorage to be quite rolly, but the waves break on the coral reef and the anchorage is left with just a gentle swell.  In the mornings and evenings, many canoeists paddle up and down the anchorage training for the forthcoming races in the July Festival.

Views of the anchorage and sunset over Moorea

The cheapest way to travel around is on ‘Le Truck’, a Bedford lorry with a wooden seating area on the back.  Pape’ete is very cosmopolitan and we could have been on the French Riviera.  The bustling waterfront comes alive at night with hordes of people eating at Les Roulettes – caravans selling all sorts of food including Chinese, pizza, hamburgers and crêpes.  There is usually some form of entertainment on the stage in the adjacent square and we’ve listened to local music and watched dancers performing both modern and traditional dances.  The market is another colourful place, bursting with flowers, tropical fruit, vegetables, fish, meat, art and souvenirs.  The ladies in the market make beautiful garlands of flowers which smell fantastic.  On a Sunday morning the market opens at 5am and shuts around 8.30 so that everyone can go to church.  We visited the Église Évangélique de Polynésie Française Church, with rousing hymns and the congregation all in white.  The service was conducted in all three languages of the Islands, Polynesian, French and English, which wasn’t so bad until the Preacher gave his sermon in all three!  It lasted quite a while!

Les Roulettes where you can get an inexpensive meal

Sunday in Pape'ete - at the market and then to church

During our first week in Tahiti, there was a dance competition for dance schools which attracted competitors from as far away as Hawaii.  Each evening four schools would compete, with the winner being announced during Heiva Nui, the main festival, in July.  We went the one evening and had a brilliant time.  Each school performed for about 30 minutes.  The ages of the dancers ranged from 3 to 50+, in all shapes and sizes.  The little 3 year olds concentrated so hard to get their bottoms wiggling that they were oblivious to where they were supposed to be, but they wiggled their whole bodies like mad.  The 7 -10 year age groups barely had a bottom to wiggle between them and there was obvious rivalry.  Once they got to their mid-teens the rivalry had reduced and they had become more fluid and expressive in their dance.  The adults were a mixture of those that really enjoyed dancing and performing and those who would rather just do it in a class and not be scantily dressed in front of a large audience.  Needless to say, Steve saw enough quivering flesh to last him for a lifetime!

Dancers at the school's competition

There is only one road around Tahiti and it is relatively flat, so we got the Brampton’s out and went for a cycle.  Its great having the bikes onboard as we are able to go and have a look at places that we would not be able to see from the sea.  We stopped many times on our ride to admire the beautiful views of mountains, beaches, crashing waves and grottoes with crystal-clear pools.  We tried to visit the Tahiti Museum on our way back, but it is closed on one day of the week and we happened to get there that day!  The mountains we saw were quite magnificent and we decided to arrange a trip up into the hills.  We managed to get 13 other ‘yachties’ together and set out on a day trip with Tahiti Safari Expedition, in two open-top Landrovers.  We left the coast road at Papenoo and followed the trails up the Papenoo Valley.  There are four hydro-electric plants in the valley, with several small reservoirs serving each.  The tracks that we followed were originally made by the engineers building the plants and the Maroto Hotel, where we had lunch, used to be the engineers’ accommodation; even today, the accommodation is quite sparse from the outside but has all round panoramic views which were quite spectacular.  We passed through a hidden world of lakes, high cliffs, lush valleys and waterfalls, most of which is still uninhabited.  The views were breathtaking and we learnt a lot from our guides on the ecology of the area and the ways of the original Tahitian people.  We stopped after lunch to swim in the very cold, crystal-clear stream water; only a few of us partook of this opportunity, but it was a very refreshing one!  A tunnel has been built to join the Papenoo Valley to the Vaihiria Valley on the other side of the Island; unfortunately, the heavy downpours in December 2006 filled the tunnel with soil and debris and they have not yet finished clearing it out.  So we took an even narrower track back down the valley.  It was a great day out and gave us a greater appreciation of Tahiti. 

Views of the Papenoo Valley

The intrepid explorers, a tiki and a marae - sacred tribal temple

On the 21^st June, as in France, Pape’ete holds a music festival.  Every town hall, bar, square and area for people to gather had some sort of music on to celebrate the Summer Solstice (for Europe any way!).  We were treated to both modern and traditional music, accompanied by dancers.  In the one bar, the band and male dance group had incorporated traditional songs with modern tunes which worked really well.

On another excursion by ‘Le Truck’, we ventured to the north of Tahiti to visit Point Venus.  This is the site of Captain Cook’s observatory which was built to record the transit of Venus across the face of the sun to try to calculate the distance between the sun and the earth.  There is also a memorial there to the Protestant missionaries who made their landfall there.  The beach is of black sand and on the day we visited covered with hundreds of children on a school outing.

It hasn’t been all play and we have spent several days doing jobs on the boat.  The longest, and most frustrating, has been our computer.  We managed to pick up a virus and spent several days, with expert help from David off ‘Pinter’, trying to get rid of it.  In the end, we had to trash the hard drive and rebuild the computer.  We still have a few problems, but at least the virus has gone.  We dived to refit our variable pitch propeller which has returned refurbished from the UK.  Hopefully, we won’t shed another blade for a long time.  We have also fitted a new compressor for one of our fridges as we have been nursing the old for the last 18 months and it finally gave up.  So that the area under the fridges doesn’t get too warm, we have fitted two small fans which operate when the compressor comes on.  It wasn’t until later that evening that we found out that the fans give off a blue light when running, so now I have my own lit dance floor!  We have also fixed the navigation lights that decided to stop working the last time we tried to use them, and we replaced the CPT autopilot belt which broke during our crossing from Rangiroa despite not using the autopilot on that trip.  Other routine maintenance was carried out such as servicing the engine and generator, greasing and adjusting the steering and cleaning the bottom of the boat, getting rid of the weed that has started to grow on it.  And as usual the general cleaning both inside and on deck.