Pictures from Taiohae, Nuku Hiva

A few pictures from our stay at Taiohae Bay. More description can be found in earlier blog posts.

These wasps visited us often on the boat. They were quite pleasant compared to wasps we had visit us in Mexico and rarely stayed for more than a few minutes.

No-see-um bites - Rani suffered strong reactions to these and suffered for weeks.

Carvings at a waterfront sculpture park.

Polynesian voyaging canoe model in a local museum run by an ex-cruiser.

Church gate

Freshly caught tuna is sold each day in the afternoon at the pier - cost about $5 a kilo.

An odd location for a phone booth. It appeared to be functional!

This cross was supposedly grafted onto an earlier sculpture of an explicit phallic nature. Note the large number of yachts that are anchored in the bay.

Hike To Haatuatua

A few pictures from a hike we made from Anaho Bay in the Marquesas.

Little critter we met on the beach.

Karim's beachfront house - a Swiss Family Robinson place

Dennis from 'Knotty Lady' leads the way to the beach at Haatuatua Bay

Tossing the caber

Another attractive resident of Haatuatua Bay

Hatiheu Pictures

These photos refer to text published earlier on this blog about a hike we made with our friends from 'Knotty Lady' from Anaho Bay to Hatiheu, a town with extensive archeological sites.

Seed pod containing a sort of cotton.

Horses frequently use the trail to Hatiheu

View from the trail at top of the ridge over Anaho Bay

Climbing to a lookoff over Anaho Bay

Look off at Anaho Bay

Pack horses with a load of melons for the market in Taiohae

Tiki of chief with casse-tete (head breaker) and child at Tohua Hikoku'a

Creation myth carving - a turtle on top of two intertwined bodies at Tohua Hikoku'a   

Recently carved tiki at Tohua Hikoku'a 

Mortar for grinding or pounding fruits, seeds, or nuts

Baking pit at Tohua Kamuihei

Paepae with reconstructed building at Tohua Kamuihei

Huge banyan tree at Tohua Kamuihei - note Rani for scale

Nicky opening a Marquesan almond

Opened Marquesan almond - small but sweet

Horse and rider on trail from Anaho to Hatiheu

Anaho Bay Pictures

These pictures belong with text that was posted earlier on this blog. Anaho Bay was our favorite anchorage on Nuku Hiva -  tranquil and the locals were very welcoming.

Approach to Anaho Bay

Anaho Bay beach

Yachts anchored off the coral reef at Anaho Bay

Catholic children's camp building

Pomegranate growing on a bush at the children's camp

Unusual garden ornaments

Cooking breadfruit over coconut husk fire

Karim prepares a baked breadfruit with Rani and Nicky (from Knotty Lady) looking on.

Tuaki shows how to de-skin a breadfruit

Large land crab - they come out at night and we saw this one on the way home from a shore-side pot-luck

Taipivai Pictures

Text related to these pictures can be found earlier in this blog. The paepae pictured may be one that Herman Melville would have visited when it was still used as a ceremonial site in the 1830s.

Rani at the paepae near Taipivai

Paepae near Taipivai

Tiki -  doesn't this look a little like a South Park character?

River near Hooumi village - a nice hike from Taipivai

Landfall in Tahiti

We arrived at anchor off Point Venus, Tahiti at midnight after a 1.5 day passage. The tall islands were visible more than 40 miles away, the mountains rising out of the clouds arond sunset. We had no problems entering the bay, with our little computer displaying an accurate chart and a GPS providing real time positions.

This morning we awoke to outrigger canoes passing us on the way to a big race for which we appear to have front row seats. The steep green mountains behind the anchorage remind us of the Marquesas, while the larger built up areas are more like what I saw in Hawaii. We will rest here a day before heading in to find an anchorage nearer town.

Our position is 17 30 S 149 22 W

Guns, Germs, Steel, and Pearls

I have been reading an excellent book - "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond. The general aim of this book is to explain why it is that, throughout history, some groups of people came to dominate others. Diamond looks at underlying factors in natural history that have had a huge influence on how cultures develop, including geography, climate, availability of plants and large animals suitable for domestication, and even orientation of the continents. The author's deep familiarity with the various peoples of New Guinea provides a number of fascinating examples in addition to the more familiar contrast of European/Asian versus American cultures. If you have ever been puzzled by questions such as why it was that the aborigines of Australia were still living in the stone age into the 19th century or why a handful of Spaniards were able to destroy the Aztec empire of Central America, then I highly recommend this book.

We visited a pearl farm near the town of Rotoava on Fakarava atoll. They culture black pearls here, which range in colour from a creamy gray, through various metallic shades of gray, to green, purplish, and a dark gray/black. The process we saw is quite interesting - more akin to a dental or fertility clinic than a farm. 'Dream Pearls' buys three year old oysters from another outfit. These are maybe 4 inches across. They then select and cut open an oyster to supply the raw ingredients for pearl formation. This is excised from the body of shells whose 'mother of pearl' exhibits the desired colour for a pearl. Slivers of meat are removed with a scalpel and then divided by scalpel again into dozens of tiny fragments.

Another oyster is then selected and carefully pried open and held that way using what looks like a medical instrument that achieves the reverse function of a pair of pliers. Into this oyster is inserted a small plastic bead (maybe 5mm diameter?) that is first soaked in antiseptic. A sliver of oyster meat from the other oyster is next inserted adjacent to the plastic bead, which will then grow over the bead and (hopefully) form a nice round pearl the same colour as the donor's shell.

The host oyster has a hole drilled in it and it is then strung up between two layers of coarse plastic mesh and hung from a line off a pier at the end of the pearl farm building. It will remain there until a boat takes each mesh out into deeper water and suspends them from a float. The oysters spend 18 months hanging in the lagoon before being retrieved and re-opened. The pearl is extracted and graded and another larger (about 9mm) bead is inserted in its place to grow another larger pearl. No new material is added for this 2nd pearl. The process will take one more year after which the 2nd pearl is removed and the oyster harvested.

The operation employs about 10 people, as far as we could see. They process 3000 oysters a day. Nice pearls sell for anywhere from 30 to 100+ dollars depending on size and quality (e.g., how perfectly shaped they are, how luminous, etc.)

We are currently en route to Tahiti and expect to arrive at Point Venus early tomorrow morning. Position is 17 02 S 148 37 W. We have had a good breeze on this crossing and made nearly 150 miles in the first 24 hours in rolly conditions.

Busy, Busy

When I think of palm fringed atolls and green coral strewn waters, I think relaxation - an escape from the stress of the work world. Strangely, we find our days here to be just as filled as we did back home, although we certainly have more say as to how we spend these hours. Take today for example - we did our weekly bucket laundry - wash, scrub, rinse, wring, rinse again, wring, rinse again, wring. We used water we had gathered last night during a rain squall by scooping water off our decks into buckets and containers. We then pegged the pillow cases, shirts, and smalls to our lifelines and ratlines - colourful pennants fluttering in the brisk southeasterly breeze. Today, doing the laundry was a pleasure. The amount was manageable, we split the work between us, and we were using lovely freshly gathered water - a gift from the sky. The sunny, windy, weather made short work of finishing things off - no fabric softener needed...

After laundry, our friends Mike and Karen on 'Chapter 2' gave us a ride to the nearby passes, where we drift-snorkeled twice through one pass and once through a smaller pass to the north. The current was snorting through the passes and we flew over trenches and hills of coral with an array of colourful fish drifting along below us. At one point two larger grey sharks swam vigorously toward us from the deeps, giving me a bit of a fright. They swam around our dinghy, probably trying to figure out what this strange multi-limbed creature was (we were hanging onto ropes tethered to the dinghy). We also saw a 6 foot lemon shark - identifiable by its colour and by having two dorsal fins.

On our way back to Ladybug we anchored off a coral reef that is the best I have seen so far. Yellows, beiges, purples, pinks, and browns in all manor of fantastic shapes. In places the formations looked like the cities imagined by science fiction writers and the fish were like shuttles drifting between towers on another world. In others the effect was like a carefully laid out botanical garden, with lovingly tended shrubs and bushes in a harmonious array of hues.

After our snorkel we had a bucket shower in the cockpit and cleaned the salt off our gear. Keeping salt out of the boat is a continuous concern, especially here where the high humidity would otherwise cause mildew inside. Next was lunch, after which I disassembled and cleaned our autopilot while Rani made hand-drawn postcards to send to our families. We rowed ashore in the late afternoon to explore the motu and walked a couple of miles, finding two neatly-maintained copra plantations and several workers' cottages. Some of these were made entirely of palm thatching over a pole frame and others were more substantial, with steel roofs. I climbed a coconut palm and brought down a few drinking nuts, which we cut up with a machete borrowed from one of the cottages. We hiked to the outer reef where we looked for shells on the coral sand beach and waded on the reef to check out some parrot fish that had been trapped in tide pools.

Back at the boat, we hoisted the dinghy on board in preparation for tomorrow's passage. Tonight we will probably read our books and maybe watch a movie on the computer. Once I post this blog, I will also download a weather file to help plan for the passage. So you see that our days are full. There seems to be little time to just lay back and relax - although neither of us is complaining.

We are currently anchored just south of the east pass of the Toau atoll. 15 56 S 145 53 W Tomorrow we sail for Anse Amyot - a small bay about 20 miles away at the northwest corner of this atoll.

Chilly temperatures, snails, and Japanese sailors

It's funny how quickly we adapt to a new climate. Wintering in Baja, Mexico, we rarely saw temperatures above 80 degrees and found the evenings quite comfortable when they dipped into the low 60's. We suffered as we sailed south to the equator and the daily temperatures rose into the 90's, dropping to the mid 80's at night, with higher humidity than we had ever seen in Baja - up to 80 percent. We are now so used to this that when it dropped last night below 80 degrees, I actually put on a night shirt and went searching for a bed sheet!

Yesterday we decided to stay put, rather than sailing north inside the atoll. The forecast showed moderate to strong southerlies and the northern end of the atoll would be at the end of 30 miles of fetch. This could produce waves of 3 or 4 feet - not at all a good place to anchor. So instead we went ashore for a walk and found our way to the most neatly kept Tuamotan home we have yet seen, with manicured shrubs set amongst the field of coral that made up its front yard. Behind the house, which was not occupied, we discovered a path through the palms and shrubs that brought us out onto the outer reef where the wind was much stronger than in our sheltered lagoon. The sea dashed itself on the reef sending small waves across the coral shelf. We waded in the coral pools collecting washed up cowry shells and marvelling at the dozens of shapes that corals form even in the confines of this shallow shelf.

We met a French couple off a cruising catamaran who showed us a bag of sea snails that they had collected from the reef. They told us that they were tasty, though chewy, and explained that they boiled them and then ate them with seasoning. On our way back to the boat, we met Jean, a local who grew up in Tahiti and had worked in the French military as a parachutist in Corsica. He is the brother of the Maheata, the woman whom Rani met a few days ago. He lives a few hundred yards away along the beach in a concrete block house raised off the sand on pilings. Jean demonstrated how to open the snail by smashing the heavy shell with another snail shell. He then cleaned the snail and offered it to me to try 'cru' or uncooked. It was chewy and not particularly flavourful. He told us that you needed good teeth to enjoy a meal of these and I began to regret having collected them! Back at the boat, I elected to steam the rest and, smothered in enough garlic butter, they were edible though very chewy.

We went for a quick swim before supper, finding the visibility here to be lousy compared to that at the pass, probably due to all the sand that has been stirred up by strong winds. Later, we had a Japanese couple from a nearby boat over for drinks and munchies. Despite the language barrier we had a good chat. They told us that although Japan is an island nation, there are few Japanese recreational sailors. They estimate that only 10 Japanese boats are currently out cruising the world. Yoshi and Mayumi told us of their trip to North America - 50 days to Prince Rupert arriving at Dixon entrance in a storm, running under bare poles at 7-8 knots! When they left Japan they had never done any sort of ocean crossing!

From Prince Rupert they sailed down the inside passage to Victoria and wintered over there in front of the Empress hotel. The next year they sailed back up around Vancouver Island and departed for San Fransisco from Ucluelet, as we had done a few years earlier. They cruised down the California coast to Mexico and then crossed to the Marquesas about the same time we did. Quite an adventurous couple, I would say!

Rain, Venus's transit, and more sharks

We had serious rain last night and plugged up the scuppers to catch some for laundry. Today we also made drinking water using our reverse osmosis system (based on pushing sea water at 800 psi through a special membrane that allows only H20 through). This takes a lot of power (14+ amps), so we did this while motoring to a new anchorage inside the atoll and we recharged our batteries at the same time. The old Balmar alternator that we had rebuilt in Mexico is working well and was putting out a nice solid 55 amps. We needed this because our batteries were quite low after a couple of gray days. Normally (on reasonably sunny days) our solar panels keep things topped up.

The new anchorage is much quieter than the one near the pass - well sheltered from the north east winds that have been blowing all day. Three related families live near the beach off which we are anchored, on a small island set in the coral rim of the atoll. We met one woman who spends most of her time on this motu, but also visits the main village about 25 miles away each week for blood tests and to buy supplies and visit her relatives. She gave us a bag of eggplants from her garden this afternoon, which we shared with the other cruisers here and we will visit her with a gift of dried bananas tomorrow.

By the way, the banana drying worked really well and we have a few pounds of them wrapped up in individual cellophane packets. The only issue is that each banana piece bears a striking resemblance to a mummified human finger because I split each banana and then cut the split section in half.

We watched the transit of Venus today from a vantage point quite near to where Captain Cook made his observations in 1769. The first voyage of Cook was funded by the Royal Society for the purpose of witnessing this transit from a suitable mid-Pacific location. This was done to enable an accurate calculation of the distance from the earth to the Sun, a baseline number upon which many astronomical calculations could then be based. We saw Venus enter the sun on the lower right side around noon and arc across the lower half until clouds obscured things near sunset. Through the sextant, Venus appeared as a black dot on the sun.

Yesterday we were swimming in a small sandy lagoon off the south pass at Fakarava when a dive boat came in with some fish, which they cleaned to make cerviche (raw fish marinated in lime juice). The bits they threw in the water attracted more than 2 dozen sharks and the feeding frenzy was quite amazing to see from our vantage point at the same level as the sharks and maybe 30 feet away. There were so many sharks in the almost enclosed pool that there were several at any time cruising a few feet from us. They were mostly smaller black tipped reef sharks but even so, there is something cold and fierce about them that strikes a primal chord. I have never been closer to so many large predators than at this time and I must give Rani cudos, for she had arrived a half hour earlier and been the only swimmer in the water here for a while, despite her fear of sharks.

We are gradually making our way north through the lagoon and had planned to stop at a couple more anchorages. However stronger south east winds may push us out the north pass and over to the atoll of Toau earlier than we had intended.

Corrections: to my last blog post - the open water PADI course here is 3 days and includes 6 dives, not 2 days/3 dives as I had stated. the shorter course is a 'Scuba Diver' course. Also - in an earlier post I mentioned that Rani dropped a flashlight overboard in 40 feet. From reading the PADI manual, I have learned that this would have put it at more than two atmospheres of pressure rather than the one atmosphere I stated...