Tuamotus – Sailing Azimuth

July 27, 2024July 27, 2024

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!

July 3, 2024July 3, 2024

An Atoll to Ourselves!

Hi to everyone. Last time we left you we were in Makemo Atoll enjoying the peace and tranquillity.

Time for me to catch up with some videos that I took over the last month or so. My laptop has been playing up recently, and it takes ages for it to process the videos. Also, I think the camera is on the blink too! Oh well, we have put these things on the list for when we get to civilisation in New Zealand, we can purchase some new stuff to keep us going. The salt atmosphere on the boat after 2 years is wrecking many electronic things on board. And yes we have now been sailing for two years!!

Here’s a video we took in Raroia Atoll at a cruisers hangout called the twin palms yacht club

You may remember that we stopped in a beautiful anchorage in Raroia called the Kon-Tiki anchorage where the Kon-Tiki crashed in 1947. Here is a video we took of the memorial at the island where they crashed.

I took this video as we sailed through the Makemo Atoll

And here is another video of our snorkelling adventures in Makemo. See if you can spot the sharks!

So Since last time, we sailed overnight to another close by Atoll called Raraka. This move was instigated by incoming inclement weather and the need for somewhere to shelter from some really strong winds. We planned to meet up with Coral Moon and ride out the blow.

Now Raraka is a little off the beaten cruiser path. The guide book describes the pass as very narrow and shallow and difficult to navigate. However, we thought we would give it a go. There is another Atoll within 20 miles of the entrance to this one had things not worked out.

We had a beautiful overnight sail, with light winds just forward of the beam, and flat seas, and we arrived at the entrance to the atoll at about 0630, when the light was good for the entrance. I approached with caution. There was clearly a large current flowing out of the channel and some standing waves too. There was very little wind though and so we sneaked in down the side and then motored hard in to the centre of the channel. It was a bumpy ride and we had about 5 knots against us. It only lasted a few minutes though, and soon the water smoothed out, and looked alarmingly shallow! It was crystal clear, and we could see all the coral on the bottom of the pass. Our trusty depth gauge refused to work as normal, but the charts said I still had 1.5m under the keel, and we quickly got in to deeper water. Phew!

With the pass negotiated, we headed across the inner lagoon on a straight line towards the anchorage. This lagoon is totally uncharted, so we relied on keeping an eye out for bommies as well as using the google earth satellite map. The wind was light and we speeded along at about 2 knots on a perfectly flat sea! That gave time for Ailsa to watch Scotland get kicked out of the Euros before we arrived at the anchorage! Starlink is mad… how we can watch a football match live whilst sailing across one of the most remote atolls in the world is beyond me!

It took several hours to arrive at the anchorage, and we were a little dismayed to see three catamarans already at anchor! But this place was incredibly beautiful and we dropped our hook with fender floats on our chain in probably the clearest water we have ever seen.

Almost straight away, we got a visit from one of the cats, welcoming us in. The three boats were travelling together and they were surprised to see another boat arriving. They each had kids onboard and the next day one if the kids celebrated their ninth birthday with a treasure hunt on the beach. Not a bad place to spend your birthday we thought. The day after that, they all departed early in the morning, so we awoke having the whole place to ourselves! Its been like that ever since, for about the last two weeks!

Hang on, you say, I thought Coral Moon was going to join you? Well unfortunately that didn’t work out. The bad weather arrived too soon, and they were stuck in Raroia.

The day after we arrived, we had a another of those magical days where the wind died completely, and the sea in the anchorage became like the glass again. We pottered about in the canoe, went swimming, chatted with the other cruisers and then headed back to the boat. I went for a siesta to sleep off the effects of the overnighter sail and Ailsa sat on deck and watched a huge Manta Ray swim past the boat!

The sunsets and sunrises here are something else. Difficult to capture on camera but we had a go

I wish we could take pictures of the night sky here too. On clear nights the milky way is plastered across the sky and there is zero light pollution.

The wind did eventually pick up and its been blowing strongly for over a week now. Looks like it might settle down again in a few days. However, this is a lovey sheltered spot. We have dodged the worst of it, and the strong breeze keeps the boat nice and cool. Its difficult to remember sometimes that we are currently in the middle of winter. It does get cooler at night and we have even started sleeping under a sheet again.

We have been taking the canoe out to explore all the nooks and cranny’s along the coast

We have been jumping out of the canoe and snorkelling

With the strong winds, the seas outside the Atoll have been progressively growing. We have taken many walks to the outer reef to the watch the waves smashing in. Its exhilarating, and we get well and truly blasted by the strong winds and sea spray.

A short walk later and we are back to the beach and in the wind shadow of the coconut palms we can swim in the crystal clear water in beautifully calm sea. It really is an idyllic place, our own slice of paradise.

We have to move on at some point, but right now we are happy just to enjoy the location and soak it all up!

That’s all for now. Catch up again soon!

June 20, 2024June 20, 2024

Dodging Bommies

Hi to everyone. last time we posted we had just arrived in the beautiful atoll of Raroia in the Tuamotu Archipelago. This time we will tell you about our exploration of this atoll and where we are currently in Makemo Atoll.

The first thing you are probably asking is what are Bommies, and why do we need to dodge them?! Well bommies are the technical cruisers term for the towers of coral that grow in these atolls. Some are tiny and some are huge. But all of them will do serious damage to your boat. So when ever you are sailing across the atolls or are trying to drop your anchor, you have to be on the look out for these underwater obstacles. Here’s a zoom in of Raroia on google maps. We use this as we are going along to try and avoid the spots you can see on the picture. These are all coral bommies that grow from the sea floor in towers up to the sea surface. The depth here is about 30 metres. There are a lot of them! One of us stands on the bow too whilst we are sailing so that they can call out to avoid ones that dont even show up on the satellite image. It makes for some hairy but fun sailing!

We stopped in two anchorages in Raroia. The first was called the twin palms yacht club which was a kind of cruisers hang out place on one of the motus. Motus are the little islands that form the edge of the atoll and are generally covered in coconut palms.

After a few days recovering from our three day sail, we moved down further south to the Kon-Tiki anchorage.

The sailing inside the Atoll is magical. Light winds and absolute flat winds and its only ever a couple of hours at most to get anywhere. You can see one of those bommies in the pictures above. That will put a dent in Azimuth if we hit it!

The Kon-Tiki anchorage is named after the famous raft that left Peru in 1947 and sailed 4500 miles across the pacific ocean until it ended its voyage when it crashed in to the reef right next to this anchorage. Its a really interesting story. They made a film called Kon-Tiki (as well as a remake in 2012) which is well worth a watch about the epic journey. We watched it whilst we were anchored here.

Its an incredibly remote place and its hard to imagine what it must have been like to crash on the reef here. The rocks are razor sharp. On the little motu next to the anchorage there is a plaque that has been installed that commemorates the journey.

It certainly is a stunning place to visit. However, its not without its challenges. Most of the time the wind howls over the reef and its hard work paddling our little canoe to shore to go and explore. Well worth the effort though!

After a few days here, we decided to move on to the another atoll and continue our journey onwards to Tahiti. Next stop was an overnight sail to Makemo. Another lovely downwind sail although the seas were quite rough.

It was an amazing sunset on the trip over. It felt like the sky was on fire.

We arrived outside Makemo the next morning just as the sun was rising and negotiated our second Atoll pass. This one was very wide and deep and the current was not too strong so we got in without issue and dropped the hook just near the pass off the village of Pouheva. This anchorage was a little rough and not so protected, but we wanted to go in to the village to get some more supplies and hopefully visit a restaurant.

We chilled for the rest of the day and then the next morning, took the canoe to shore. We took a walk around this really pretty town. Everyone was really friendly and we had a lovely morning.

We went to a couple of the supermarkets and stocked up. Later that day we went to shore again and had chicken and chips at a little restaurant.

It was dark by the time we got back to the canoe and the wind was howling too. It was a wet ride back to the boat and the highlight was a large shark that appeared right in front of the canoe as we crossed a reef!

The next day we decided to move somewhere else in the atoll that was a bit more comfortable. That’s where I am writing this post from now. We have been here about a week and it really is a stunning place.

After a couple of days in our new home, the wind completely died. We woke up to the most serene place you could ever imagine. It was hard to describe what it was like. It was difficult to discern the sea from the sky. The water was crystal clear, where you could see every fish clearly and even see our anchor chain in 11metres of water.

We spent all afternoon that day exploring the anchorage in the canoe and snorkelling. At some point I will put together a video of some of it. We also explored the reef that extends from the shore and saw quite a few black tip sharks in the shallows.

Another great sunset ended that day…

The next day couldn’t have been more different in terms of the weather. There was a huge low pressure depression about 500 miles to the south of us and the tail end of it swept across the atoll with strong winds and waves battering the anchorage. It only lasted 24 hours thankfully!

Yesterday with the weather calm enough to get back in the canoe again we went to shore and went for a fabulous walk along the edge of the atoll. On the outer shore, we were really dismayed to sea so much plastic in a place as remote as this washed up on the reef. The sooner they ban single use plastic packaging and bottles the better in my opinion.

Plastic waste aside, this place is so very special and deserves all our efforts to protect it for future generations to enjoy.

I feel very privileged to have the chance to visit this special place. Check out these really cool fossilised corals. The place is covered in them, all washed up from the outer reef

We’re probably going to chill out here for a while longer and wait for our friends on Coral Moon to catch up with us before we move in to the next atoll. Its such a hardship!

Join us next time then as we continue to explore the Tuamotus.

June 10, 2024June 10, 2024

Sailing to the Tuamotus

French Polynesia is huge! It consists of many groups of islands or archipelagos that cover an area of sea about the size of wester Europe. We have three months to explore this area on our visa and so no chance to cover it all. Having been in the Marquesas Islands for over a month of this time, we felt it was now time to move on and explore another region called the Tuamotus Archipelago. This archipelago consists of over 80 pacific atolls, some of which can be entered in a boat through a narrow pass in to a very protected central lagoon. Here’s a map of all the atolls so you can sort of get your bearings.

This map shows you where the Tuamotus are in relation to French Polynesia and the Marquesas Islands

So the winds in across French Polynesia are fairly predictable at this time of year, they are called the South East trade winds and generally blow from the East or South East. From a sailing point of view then, it means that you can sail relatively easily from the Marquesas to the middle of the Tuamotus on a beam reach. We decided to try and head for the atoll of Raroia.

Its 430 miles from Nuku Hiva to Raroia with a close pass of the Disappointment Isles! So called apparently because these islands do not have a navigable pass in to the centre of the atoll and were therefore very disappointing to the people who fist discovered them.

We had a good looking weather window for what should be a three day passage and so we set off on a sunny Sunday morning hoping to at least clear the Marquesas Island of Ua Pou before it got dark. The wind was quite light, about 10-12 knots and the seas were virtually flat too. At times it was easy to forget that we were actually sailing and not sitting at anchor as we ghosted along at 4-5 knots!

A few hours in I decided to get the new fishing tackle out that I had recently bought in Taiohae. I got two lines in the water and within about 10 minutes both lines went at the same time! The first guy got away just as I was about to pull it on board. But this chap was lunch and dinner for the next couple of days! My first skipjack tuna. Big too, about 12 pounds.

That kept us busy for an hour or so, getting the fish filleted. After that we settle back down to the relaxing sail and enjoyed the view of Ua Pou out of the port window with its striking volcanic peaks.

The amazing sea and wind conditions were to carry on for at least 48 hours and we were really enjoying it. Then someone turned the wind fans on! We got hit by a small squall in the night, but rather than it being a little event, it just carried on. The seas picked up too. It was cloudy for a bit, and then it cleared and became sunny again but now the wind was blowing 20 to 30 knots consistently. We reefed Azimuth right down to 2 reefs in the main and three in the genoa, but being beam on to the swell we were getting thrown around a bit and surfing the waves too. So the speed for the next 30 hours averaged about 8.5 knots and we covered 190 miles in 24 hours.

Not the most comfortable sailing. We were taking waves over the windscreen occasionally too. Poor Ailsa felt a bit worse for the wear, and neither of us felt like doing much other then sitting on the sofa. Thankfully a good supply of biscuits came to the rescue because we didn’t feel like cooking.

We covered the ground really quickly though and as we got to within a few hours of Raroia, things started to slowly calm down. When we got in to the lee of the atolls and could see the little islands dotted on the horizon, the sea calmed right down and the sailing became much more enjoyable.

I was a little nervous about going through the pass in to the atoll. Its quite narrow and shallow, but more concerning is the strong currents that can flow up to 5 knots in this pass. If the tide is against the wind and the wind is strong then this can cause large standing waves.

We arrived just after another boat and we watched them transit the pass without issue, so we both felt at ease. In the end it was not bad at all. We had 4 knots of current with us and whisked through the pass easily

Its a stunning place to approach. The atoll is surrounded by small islands covered in coconut palms and the sea is a turquoise azure blue colour.

We motored across the lagoon in to a strong headwind with Ailsa on the front so that we could avoid the patches of coral that are dotted everywhere colloquially called “bommies” and dropped the hook at a stunning anchorage. First impressions ….. amazing!

View from the front of the boat at anchor

Join is again soon when we explore our new home, our first Pacific Atoll!