Birds and Butterflies and a few Fish

Chris walks up the hill above Bai Maa - Ladybug is anchored in the bay behind.

Rani takes a local truck for a 'spin'.

We are less than ten miles from Noumea but it's like another world. The Baie Maa is quite a large bay and had thirty five boats anchored in it over the long weekend, almost all locals enjoying their civic holiday. Most of the action remained on the water with people water-skiing, swimming and speeding about in small skiffs. We took to the shore and found a red dirt road skirting the beach. In one direction lies a small cottage community with a nice picnic park and gold sand beach. We took a short walk through the "village" one day and stopped at the locked gate which allows access from the main road to Noumea. Some of the cottages were shipping containers with added porches and awnings, pretty floral gardens completing a cute rustic picture.

Niaouli trees look a bit like small stubby Eucalyptus trees.

This windmill used to pump water to a nearby cottage, now abandoned

Monarch butterflies mating

The monarchs were feeding on the flowers from these plants

Over the next two days we explored the road closest to our boat and hiked through the valley and over scrubby hills to four other beaches to the south. Farmers must be mowing the roads to either keep track of their livestock or go hunting. Otherwise the long grass would be hard to walk through. We startled some sheep a few times and saw deer scat but no deer. Birds whistled and sang in the trees and bright orange monarch butterflies danced in the breeze. A young man we met on one walk pointed out the niaouli trees and crushed a few leaves to let us inhale the menthol-like scent. Niaoulis populate the dry savannah of the west coast of New Caledonia after the land has been cleared by farmers for grazing.

Sheep gallop past us on the coastal road that runs along the bay

Chris explores a vacation property we found on a peninsula near the bay.

Rani's blouse matched the bougainvillea

The beaches were a mix of sand and coral rubble and there were a few shaded grassy spaces which had been used by campers, judging by the ashes of fire pits and heaps of beer cans. It is a pity that those who enjoy the outdoors cannot be bothered to respect the land and remove their trash. We also came across a gorgeous closed-up holiday property comprising two boarded up cottages and a large gazebo with their own private beach. There was a fruit orchard with mango, guava and Kumquat trees. Vivid pink and orange Bougainvillea flowers draped over the cottages and it seemed a shame that no-one was there to enjoy it.


We came back re-charged after 3-4 hours of hiking in this pastoral paradise each day and then enjoyed a cool dip off Ladybug. Evenings were spent chatting and eating with new and old friends on Akimbo, Barefoot and Sir Francis.

The following photos were taken a day later on a trip out to some islands near the edge of Grand Terre's lagoon.

We saw some new fish on the reefs at a nearby island

Lovely colours and patterns

Most of the corals were of the stag horn variety, but we came across a couple of small bommies wth healthy growths of soft  and hard corals

These electric blue fish were common on the two bommies.

Photos from our trip to Amedee Island

The pictures that follow are mostly taken at Ilot Amedee, which has the tallest lighthouse in New Caledonia and one of the tallest in the world at 56 meters. We sailed there for the day from our anchorage off Ile Bailly

View from a mooring off Amedee Island

Our friends on Barefoot arrive under mainsail after striking their jib.

The entrance to Fare (lighthouse) Amedee

The spiral staircase has 247 steps

Panorama from viewing platform - (click for larger image)

Rain spout details above the lens windows

David, Roslyn (off Barefoot), Rani and Chris

They built this tower to last and took care to make it a work of beauty as well

View through the rails to our boats on moorings

And a couple of earlier pics:

Sunset at Noumea

Rani plays catch the pumice ball at Isle Bailly

Pictures from Noumea Tahitian Festival

A few pics from the dance events at the Tahitian festival last weekend:

Dance school dancers performed during the day on Friday and Saturday

The professionals gave evening performances

Rani attended both evening performances where 4 groups gave separate shows.

First Cruise in New Caledonia

We sailed to Ile Bailly a few days ago to escape the busy urban existence of Noumea. This small island lies only about 8 miles as the fruit bat flies from Noumea or 12 miles' sail around reefs and across the busy local shipping channels. Ile Bailly is a popular destination for local picnickers and day trippers on the weekend. Barefoot with David and Roselyn on board is also here and we have been enjoying their company, holding pot lucks on our respective boats.

We took advantage of the quiet anchorage and relatively clean water to wipe the collected growth from Ladybug's bottom. The paint we applied in New Zealand has held up well except in a few places where I did not prepare the surface properly and it has flaked off. There was only a small amount of fouling and it was easily removed with a cloth. Our neighbors on Barefoot use a hookah - an underwater breathing device that uses a 12 volt compressor to push air down through special hoses to a regulator. This allows the bottom cleaner to stay underwater continuously, whereas I have to take repeated deep breaths and try to conserve air for as long as possible as I hold on to some part of the boat and scrub with the other hand.

We discovered that our island has a good supply of pumice stone - volcanic rock from nearby underwater eruptions, probably in the Kermadec islands. These light rocks are great for playing toss with and if you throw one in the ocean by accident it usually washes up on the beach in a few minutes. Rani and I got our exercise here with a couple of short hikes to the small hills on the island and a few sessions of catch the pumice rock.

Yesterday we sailed with Barefoot out to Ilot Amedee. This island lies about 12 miles from here and boasts the tallest lighthouse in New Caledonia. The huge iron tower was built in Paris in 1862 and assembled on the island a few years later. It is made of iron plates over an iron truss framework and one can climb the 247 stairs to the viewing platform for a nominal cost. The tower is beautifully shaped, with a curved portion at its base that must have housed the keepers prior to automation. There are also touches that you never see on modern construction - star shaped bolt heads and bronze lion head gargoyles to direct rain run-off away from the viewing platform. The view out over the island an surrounding reefs is spectacular and we spent almost an hour up there chatting with our friends and recovering from the climb up.

Unfortunately the island is near a major pass and receives a large swell that rolls around the small fringing reefs and creates a most uncomfortable anchorage. There are about a dozen mooring balls placed here, but these should not be trusted to hold larger boats as we learned when an Australian sailboat broke free and nearly drifted onto our friends' boat. The mooring line was made of rope and it had chafed through. The guide says that these moorings are for boats less than 10 meters but every boat we saw tied to them was longer than this. One of them was over 15 meters, far larger than what they were designed for, so perhaps the chafe was due to being repeatedly overloaded. We left the anchorage around 3:30p.m. and had a wet and blustery ride in 20 knots winds back to Ile Bailly, arriving just before sunset.

We plan to sail back to Noumea tomorrow to meet up with friends on Chapter 2 who will be leaving soon for New Zealand.

The Museum of New Caledonia

We are still anchored in Noumea, enjoying this interesting hybrid European and South Pacific city. There are several museums in the city, some quite convenient to where we are anchored, including the excellent Museum of New Caledonia. This museum displays cultural artifacts from New Caledonia and nearby Pacific islands. Following are some pictures we took of their collection:

House posts in the first gallery. These served as entrance and center posts for the round New Caledonian houses.

Roof pole detail

Entrance post detail

Mask used in mourning ceremony

Mask with human hair

Some areas carved masks with string relief, other more flat

Ceremonial ax head of jade

Lobster trap

Medicine pots were made by the men while women made the cooking pots

Mask from Vanuatu

Pigs tucks were used as money in Vanuatu - the longer the better, The pigs teeth were removed to allow the  tusk to recurve

Bridal head dress from New Guinea

New guinea bowls

Mast displaying people whose deaths were to be avenged by head hunting - Papua New Guinea

Noumea and Some Catch Up Pics

Cathy and Dave from Light Speed

Light Speed came alongside to give us access to their personal wifi hot spot before we left Fiji

The red rocks of New Caledonia indicate mineral and metal deposits

Ore carrier passes close as we sail down the lagoon toward Noumea

Underway in a nice following 20 knot breeze

A cruise ship passes close to our stern in Noumea

Cruise ship departing for an overnight passage

Rani enjoys a birthday glass or wine with a full moon behind her.

And yet another ship passing our anchorage

Rani dances on her birthday 

Cathedral de St. Joseph

Statue of Joan of Arc

Birthday lunch of vegetable couscous for Rani and Coucous Poulet for Chris

The locals carve totems similar in some ways to those from the west coast of Canada

Pasage to New Caledonia - Day 6 and 7

Since our last post, we have arrived in Noumea, the capitol of New Caledonia. It was quite a shock to walk around a busy city with multi-lane highways and fashionably dressed people. We are anchored on the fringe of a large mooring field with our transom poking out into a channel through which run many high speed ferries, tugs, yachts, and even a cruise ship or two.

Yesterday we made landfall, anchoring in the east arm of the Baie du Prony after a 12 mile run up the Havannah channel. We stayed there overnight, flying our yellow quarantine flag and this morning we sailed the remainder of the way to Noumea.

Our last day on passage was very rough with a strong wind out of the east and many squalls with gusts between 30 and 40 knots. We ran for most of the day downwind with cross swells from the east and southeast and additional waves from the squalls making the ride very rough. I filmed a few minutes of this and will try to put it up on YouTube when we are back in a place with fast internet. At times the waves would combine to produce a foamy mountain of water that threatened to join us in the cockpit!

We will stay in New Caledonia for a month or so before making the passage back to New Zealand.

Pasage to New Caledonia - Day 5

In the early afternoon we began to feel a large irregular swell setting in from the southeast. This proved to be the forerunner of some truly nasty weather. The wind filled in mid-afternoon, rising quickly to 25 to 30 knots - much higher than the automated forecast model predicted. We reefed down the main and then dropped it entirely. Soon even the full jib was too much and we were being thrown on our sides in sharp breaking 3 meter swells. In the stronger gusts Ladybug would come off the waves with a crash, so we reefed down to about a third of the small jib - an area about the size of a dinghy sail. Even then our 10 ton boat was making about 6 knots.

Because of the timing of tides in the Havannah channel, we cannot slows things down too much if we are to make landfall on Thursday, so I have been adjusting the jib and windvane steering to keep us on track and moving along around 6 knots. Comfort on board has suffered and it is very difficult to get any sleep due to the violent motion - a typical roll of 30 or more degrees in one direction and then back maybe 20 degrees in the other.

It is on days like this that we think of how lucky we are to have the technology on board to navigate and steer from the safety of the cabin. We passed four or five miles off Durand Reef in the early morning hours, where the water shoals up from more than a kilometer to a few meters. Because of our GPS and electronic charts, we were confident that we would avoid this danger. Had we been relying on sextant and deduced reckoning, this would have been a tense few hours with continuous position plotting making allowance for drift, current, and the somewhat erratic course we were steering through the squalls. The Monitor windvane has steered us without complaint, despite having to fight against the huge breaking waves and frequent gusty squalls. Without this 'third crew member' we would have to take turns in the cockpit, steering by hand - an exhausting prospect! Finally, we have a weather forecast, which while a bit inaccurate at least tells us roughly what to expect and when it will occur. On my passage to Hawaii and Canada from Mexico a few years ago I had no effective long range radio and the absence of weather forecasts was very stressful.

Our position at 6 am is 22 10 S 167 54 E. We sailed about 108 miles in 24 hours (prior to the arrival of the high winds). We both have a few bruises, but the Ibuprofen is working and this will be over by dinner time, knock on wood...