Manta Ray video from Suwarrow

The following video is from our friends Johanne and Camilla of s/v Flow. It is a beautiful montage of videography and still photos taken while the girls were free diving with the manta rays in Suwarrow. The mantas are incredibly graceful creatures, an illusion of birds flying under water.

 http://youtu.be/apIwZMnTvLE

Suwarrow Pictures

We are finally getting around to posting some pictures from our delightful stay at Suwarrow.  More information can be found in earlier posts. The pictures below are from pot-lucks, a bird-watching trip, and swimming with mantas.

Anchorage at Suwarrow - Anchorage Island

Harry and Ants (Anthony) at the Caretaker's Lodge

Ants and Harry cook in a separate shelter. Because they had no propane , they were using a cement oven and fires for cooking. The Cook Island authorities messed up their food delivery, leaving them without half of their groceries, so the yachties tried to help out with potlucks and invitations for meals on board.

Wine tasting on the beach - Chris at the bar with John and Pat of  s/v The Rose

Typical pot-luck on the beach

Great singing and strumming from Tom of s/v Barraka and friends

Harry was a professional musician in New Zealand. He played us traditional cook island melodies as well as more recent tunes.

Both Ants and Harry gave the cruisers a talk on their culture and history.

Statue of Tom Neal who lived on Suwarrow alone for many years.

Rainbow over Barraka

Damawhil - The mega-yacht that we visited. Note the scale with the very small crew-member on the foredeck.

Nesting booby

We think this is a tropic bird chick

Frigate bird colony

Baby Frigate and what we think is a mother bird

Immature Frigate Bird

Manta approaching cleaning station (photo courtesy s/v Victory)

Rani diving down to get a closer look (photo courtesy of Jan Bart s/v Victory)

"If only I could be as graceful"- Rani

International Cross Roads

Tom Neale, the Cook Islander who lived alone for many years on the island off which we are anchored, would have been shocked if he woke up one day to the sight of 25 boats floating in his lagoon. In Neale's time on Suwarrow, one or two yachts a year might visit this isolated atoll. The fleet of cruising boats that is here now includes voyagers from Poland, Italy, Germany, Austria, Canada, US, England, Norway, New Caledonia, France, Malta, Scotland, and Australia. The yachts range in size from about 30 feet to over 120 feet!

Last night cruisers on the Australian catamaran 'Fantazia' organized a Blue Moon potluck on the beach. We feasted on an inventive selection including curries, salads, pastas, and freshly caught coconut crabs and fish. Around dusk, we walked across the island to see the full moon rise and to watch the shark feeding. Stephan from 'Charlotte' stood on the edge of the reef throwing pieces of fish into water boiling with 20 frenzied sharks ranging from 3 to 5 feet. To give the watching cruisers a thrill, Stephan reached into the melee and lifted a shark out by its tail. The poor thing was most perturbed when it found itself hoisted out of its element and tried its best to bite the hand that had been feeding it, but without success.

Tonight we were invited on a French mega yacht for another potluck. We had seen this boat when anchored off Fare in Huahine a month ago where it towered over the rest of the fleet with its five spreader rig. It is the largest boat in the anchorage at 37 meters with an 8.5 meter beam. The owner, Christian gave us a tour before dinner, explaining how engineering a boat this size presents quite a different challenge from smaller production boats. The vessel was designed and built in Holland of aluminum. It can be sailed by as few as two people, but the loads on such a huge sailing ship must be very carefully handled.

Obviously it is impossible to cope with the huge forces on a 37 meter boat without a lot of mechanical help. All the lines are controlled from an electrical panel at either of the two wheels. Hydraulics are used to to power all the winches. The primary winches for the genoa and main sheets are about 18 inches in diameter (the size of end-tables). The mast and boom are carbon fiber, the boom being much longer than a typical suburban house and wide enough that one could sleep across its width. Despite its huge size, the boom only weighs about 1000 lbs because of its ultra-light construction. The mast is held up by rod rigging with tension of many tons on each stay. The stays have no turnbuckles to tension them, but instead the mast was jacked up until it exerted 8 tons of pressure on the hydraulic jack and then wedged in place. The sails are huge and weigh hundreds of pounds each - the genoa alone is 1500 square feet - twice as large as all our sails put together.

Down below, there are two seating areas each the size of a large living room and below these, cabins for the owner and guests. The interior was designed in Italy and finished in a beautiful hardwood, mixed with panels of a white composite and laminate floors. The crew quarters and galley are separated from the owner's quarters by a watertight bulkhead and door. We were briefly shown the engine room where a caterpillar diesel provides both primary drive through a massive shaft and a bow thruster for maneuvering. The muffler for this engine is larger than our entire diesel. There are also two diesel generators that run about 4 hours a day to handle the electrical demands and two large water makers to provide on-demand fresh water.

Unusually for such a large yacht, Christian, the owner is also the captain and is always aboard the boat while underway. He usually sails with a crew of three other people, including a Swiss first mate. Christian, and his friends Pierre, and Idi, joined us and Carol and Livia from 'Estrellita' for a moonlit dinner on deck. Much of the conversation was in French, but I did my best to keep up, and was able to contribute a small amount. Christian is an affable host and made us all feel at ease. The next day he visited us for coffee on Ladybug and we were able to give him a somewhat shorter tour of our little boat.

We are underway for Samoa in 3 meter swells and 20+ knots of wind - rolling and surfing down waves at an average speed of 7 knots. At this rate it will be a fast, if uncomfortable passage. Our position now is 13 29 S 165 20 W.

Update from Suwarrow

It must be a week or so since our last post and we are still anchored in Suwarrow - a remote atoll in the Cook Islands.

We have spent the last week snorkeling on reefs around the lagoon, swimming with the giant mantas, and visiting nesting bird colonies on the motus that lie around the edge of the reef. There is also an active social life here, with potlucks on the beach about once every three days. We organized a wine tasting a few days ago and have had some great musical sessions with the island care takers and cruisers from a couple of musical boats who have recently arrived.

The snorkeling has been amazing: visibility up to 30 meters, gigantic coral formations with fantastic shapes and colours, and many fish that are new to us because they are not found as far east as French Polynesia. The corals at 7 Islands rise like three story buildings out of 10 meters of crystal clear waters and you can swim through openings in the coral and weave your way between the buildings - a feeling much like flying through a Disney-created fantasy city. On 'Perfect Reef', we swam across the top of the reef in only a foot of water - a sandy coral plain strewn with bi-valves the shape of baseballs. On the edge of this plain, the reef plummets into an abyss providing a startlingly blue backdrop to large schools of greeny blue parrot fish. At a smaller reef between 7 Islands and Entrance Island we saw a Napoleon Wrasse as large as the one we swam with at Fakarava - over a meter in length.

The mantas have a 'cleaning station' on a reef close to the anchorage and we have visited them a couple of times. One of these is entirely black, without the usual white underbelly. It is also the largest we have seen at about 3 meters - a truly imposing sight. We will post some pictures of these that our friends have taken with their underwater cameras.

The bird colony we visited lies on the Gull islands near the entrance pass. The birds were not frightened by the arrival of a dozen people and we were able to view them without binoculars. We saw a variety of frigate bird, different from the 'Magnificent Frigates' of Mexico. The young birds develop a rather handsome russet head covering as they grow older. There were also tern colonies and a handful of red-beaked tropic birds.

We had a potluck to celebrate setting a new record with 21 boats in the anchorage. Harry and Ants (Anthony), the caretaker and his assistant, played and sang Cook Islands songs as well as popular tunes that we were more familiar with. It turns out that Harry was professional musician in New Zealand. He is an excellent guitar player and has a fine voice. Ants harmonized with Harry and became more and more creative in his vocalizations as the evening went on and the drinks continued to flow.

We organized a red wine tasting and a dozen boats and more than 20 people took part. Michael and Barbara on Astarte helped by printing out scoring sheets and bar-tending. The wines were mainly French and from the duty free shop in Papeete, but strangely, the highest rated wine was from California - a Barefoot Cabernet Sauvignon. In second place was a Serame Cab from France, and in third place a Bordeaux.

We will probably be here until the middle of the week and then plan to sail for Apia in Samoa.

Arrived in Suwarrow

We are anchored in the small atoll of Suwarrow - a Cook Island administered as a national park. Position: 13 14.8 S 163 06.5 W We were the 21st boat here when we dropped the hook early this morning - some kind of record for number of cruising boats, I think.

The passage took almost exactly 6 days, with a brief wait this morning for enough light to enter the pass. Ladybug ran 720 miles to make good about 660 for an average speed of 5 knots. Not a fast passage, but given lighter following winds, we are happy with our fat little boat's performance.

We plan to stay a week or more here to snorkel the unspoiled corals and enjoy the reefs and beaches of Anchorage island. To balance all the dry, boat maintenance related posts, Rani has promised to write something interesting soon.