Raraka Atoll and Onwards to Tahiti

Last time we left you, we were tucked up in Raraka Atoll in the Tuamotus Archipelago in French Polynesia. This time we show you more of Raraka Atoll and then we sail to Tahiti for our last 10 days in French Polynesia (well officially!).

We continued to spend our time enjoying Raraka. I went out pretty much everyday for long walks along the beach, the outer reef, and exploring the coconut groves.

Further down the atoll I came across another very narrow pass in the reef to the lagoon. The water there was like a small stream flowing in to the lagoon.

I took a few short videos of different things in the atoll. One afternoon, we were visited by a huge shoal of tiny fish being chased by large barracudas and swarms of birds flying over the top.

We had lots more swims at the beach

And on one of my walks I followed this shoal of fish down the beach just swimming in the shallows.

Having been in Raraka on our own for three weeks, our friends Donna and Mark on Coral Moon came to join us. It was a lovely reunion, as they had been stuck in Raroia for the three weeks that the weather had been blowing hard. The day after they arrived, the wind dropped and we had complete calm in the anchorage again.

We spent a couple of evenings on the beach and cooked on an open fire. Such a special place to enjoy with good friends!

When we arrived on the beach in early evening, the place was covered in hermit crabs. Donna took this video of a few that we set up to have a race!

Donna and Mark have a drone, and they flew it from the beach one day. Here are some shots of the two boats at anchor and aerial views of the atoll. It gives you a better overall feel of where we were. We love that shot of the two boats at anchor with the shadow on the sand underneath them!

I spent a couple of days scraping the barnacles that had accumulated on Azimuths bottom since we left Panama. I took this short video to show you how clear the water was under the boat in the anchorage

All good things come to an end. It was with a heavy heart that we prepared to set sail to Tahiti for our last few days in French Polynesia. When it came time to pull up the anchor it seemed Raraka didn’t want us to leave either, the anchor windlass was completely seized up! We could hear the hydraulic motor trying to turn, but the windlass remained stationary. Thankfully the wind was very light, and we were only anchored in 4m of water, so I managed to wind in most of the chain by hand, and then did the final 5 metres with a rope back to the big winch in the cockpit. Not fun! And also worrying, as we totally rely on the windlass, especially as we never go to marinas.

With very light winds, we sailed back along our previous track through the atoll and a couple of hours later we reached the pass. We motored through the pass without any issues. The flow was very strong though, and the standing waves threw Azimuth about a bit as we hit 11knots with the strong current. Its only a few hundred metres though and you reach deep ocean on the outside of the reef. There was no wind, so we motored for an hour around the North end of Raraka and then the wind kicked in blowing quite strongly from the South (not as forecast!) and we took a close hold down to the south of Fakarava atoll as the sun set and then a bean reach out in to the channel between the Tuamotus and Tahiti. It was a very pleasant sail overnight towards Tahiti, and as the sun came up, we could see Tahiti in the distance as we approached it from the North.

We dropped the hook just off the beach at Venus Point. It was a little rough, and we could have gone round the corner to the anchorage at Papette with all the other cruising boats, but I wanted a relatively shallow and quiet anchorage where I would be able to work on the windlass and see if I could repair it.

As it turned out, Venus Point is actually where Captain Cook and his crew anchored when they first discovered Tahiti in the 1700’s. It is also the same place where the infamous ship The Bounty landed too before the mutiny. Nowadays, the black sand beach is a very popular spot with the locals for swimming and water sports. Its a very vibrant spot.

It took me two days, but I managed to fix the windlass! The culprit was the gearbox. I have already had problems with that that involved a complex repair in Martinique where I had to build a frame around the gearbox after its mountings sheared and completely corroded away. This time I had to remove some 25 year old bolts and get the lid off the box itself. What I found inside (see picture!( was pretty shocking and I am amazed the thing had worked for so long. The box was full of mud, gunk and solidified grease! I couldn’t actually see any gears. So I set to trying to free up the mechanism. It was a slow process digging out the crud with a pick and small screw driver. I think I removed at least half a kilo of mud! Eventually I found the gears, and it started to look more promising. Once I had dug out the main gear which didn’t look worn and could see the worm gear attached to the motor, I decided to give the thing another go. It worked!!!! I was a happy man. Still it took another half a day to continue to dig out more crud which was speeded up by running the unit to force more crud out of the gears. I used the air compressor to blow out all of the last little bits too. It was about as clean as I could get it, so I filled the entire box with fresh grease and refitted the lid. The seal on the top of the shaft was completely perished, that was what had allowed all that dirt in to the box, so I used some neoprene from an old wetsuit to make a new makeshift seal and then covered the rest of the box with plastic sheet to keep it dry and clean. Putting the whole thing back together, it now seems to run a lot better than it used to!

That was a big relief to get that running again. I felt a bit worse for the wear after two days stuck in the anchor locker! Really it needs a new gearbox, something we will look in to when we reach New Zealand later in the year.

So, now we had some time to enjoy Tahiti and also to restock the boat for our next leg of the journey. First we went to shore and took at look at Venus point and went to our first restaurant in over a month.

That afternoon we found the local supermarkets about a mile away. We did our first large shop and lugged it in the heat back to the beach and then the half mile canoe ride back to the boat. We were both exhausted!

The next day we negotiated our first Tahiti bus ride in to the capital town of Papette, about 8 miles down the coast. We had a nice wander around the town and stopped for lunch at another restaurant. Papette wasn’t very inspiring, although the market was very vibrant. In typical French fashion, it being a Saturday, all the shops shut after lunch and the place became a ghost town!

A couple of days later we headed back to Papette and hired a car so we could complete our shopping trips and also go for a drive around the island. We headed back to the supermarket and did the first of two enormous shops! Back to the beach and two canoe trips back to the boat again we collapsed exhausted!

We headed out the next day for our tour of the island. It was a great day . Our first stop was at a spectacular waterfall about 300 feet tall.

Next stop was a bizarre blowhole on the coast. The sea rushes in to a cave and forces air and spray out of a small hole in the cliff through an ancient lava pipe.

We stopped at more waterfalls and saw some very cool rock carvings

Then we headed to a very nice restaurant with an ocean view. We weren’t so bothered about the view as we have that everyday from Azimuth! However the food was amazing. I had this carpaccio of tuna with ginger. it was delicious

Finally we headed down to the South of the Island where we were bizarrely stopped at three separate check points by the police asking where we were going? We said we were just tourists on a tour of the island by car. They let us through each time. Eventually we got to a small town and were directed in to a car park by an official with signs of Paris 2024 Olympics everywhere?! We had inadvertently arrived at the location for the Paris 2024 Olympics surfing village. It was being setup in time for the starting ceremony (in two days time). So we went for a wander and a drink.

The next day we did another shop and trawl back to the boat. That completed the provisioning. We then headed back to Papette to start the checkout process. This was complex. Two days previously I had emailed the port authorities to request our international clearance. You have to give them 72 hours notice. This day, the day before our departure we had to head back to Papette and locate the customs building and complete a customs declaration. That went smoothly.

Finally, on the day of our departure we drove all the way to the airport to attend immigration. We were shown to the right place by a nice policeman and then we sat and waited for the chief officer to come and process our passports etc. What an arsehole he turned out to be! He talked in fast French with us struggling to understand him. Then he took our paperwork away and came back a minute later and told us we did not have the correct port authority. I tried to explain that I had emailed the port requesting that 72 hours ago, and had a reply to say it was okay. He did not like that answer, and then processed to tells us to go away and come back in two hours because it was his lunchtime. The time at this point was 11 30! We explained that we had to return our car back to the rental place at that time. The rental place was 4 miles away and it meant we would have to drop the car off and return by expensive taxi back to the airport. He then just started ranting at us is French and told us to leave!

We decided we were not happy with this. So we decided just to leave Tahiti without completing the immigration. Hopefully this will not bite us in the future! We want to come back to French Polynesia at some point. We have never met a worse official than this guy. Totally unreasonable, especially as we had done everything correctly. We have also never seen such a poor system for checking out of a country. Three government institutions are involved and no one seems to talk to anyone else.

After leaving the airport we dropped the car off and caught the bus back to Venus point where we went to the restaurant had lunch and calmed down with a cold beer. Heading back to the boat we lifted the anchor (with a working windlass!) and sailed off away from Tahiti.

Overall we enjoyed Tahiti. It was a lot of hard work with repairs and shopping. The tour around the island was great, but the checking out process was a complete nightmare! Currently we are hiding out in another of the society islands waiting for a weather window to sail to the cook Islands. More on that next time!