Exploring Raiatea and Taha'a (Part I)

<i>The "Exploring XYZ…" series is our attempt to remember everything we can about the anchorages and stops we make, mostly to benefit cruisers who follow us in future years. We anticipate folding this information into a wiki or Soggy Paws compendium as soon as possible. In the meantime, please feel free to ask questions; If we can remember, we'll share. GPS marks are for reference only. If you use them for navigation and hit something, it's not my fault.</i>

With teeth and outboard resolved, Don Quixote moves back into our more typical gypsy mode. We move anchorages almost daily, dipping into and out of baies, passes, and reefs to test the waters. Serendipity has brought us together with Ceildyh for this section of our voyages ensuring that we have good company for most of our adventures. Like us, they seem willing to change anchorages frequently dependent on mode, luck, and boat breakage. They also like rum cocktails, which is a helpful lubricant to good relations.

Raiatea and Taha'a are actually two islands which share a single barrier reef. The gap between reef and islands is unusually wide, frequently enabling boats to sail from point to point behind the reef. The novelty of sailing once again in light breezes with absolutely no wind or swell is appealing to the entire family. We find ourselves attempting to sail everywhere which can sometimes get a bit ridiculous as we tack back and forth quite literally caught between a rock and a hard place. Raiatea is the larger and southern of the two islands and boasts the second largest town in the Societies -- a whopping 5,000 people. Despite the small size, Uturoa boasts two grocery stores and a farmers market as well as hardware stores worthy of the name. In fact, many boats choose to complete their final provisioning on Raiatea as the selection is as great as Bora Bora and many report that the prices are considerably cheaper.

Our first days on Raiatea were spent at the Raiatea Carenage. This is a haul out and careening facility found on the north west end of Raiatea, all the way around the corner past the airport and the Tahiti Yacht Charter base. If available, you can pick up a CNI yellow mooring ball for roughly $15USD (1300 CFP) per night. We never saw a ball available. The anchorage in front of the facilities is just awful. Steep to and rocky, it's hard to find a shallow spot and even harder to set the hook. There is considerably better anchorage across the channel and on the reef to the west. We couldn't take advantage of it, however, as our problem was a dinghy motor. The last thing we wanted to do was row over a mile across the channel in 20 knot winds. Ceildyh was very happy with the quality of the sailmaker they found at the charter marina just around the corner, we were reasonably convinced that the outboard mechanique knows what he's doing. The facility consists of multiple buildings all housed on the same bit of land. It looks like you could have virtually any type of boat work done by someone in that yard. The only issue is unless you bring your own parts, anything that needs fixing with speciality bits and pieces is likely going to have to come from Papeete before it can be grafted to your vessel. The haul out is on rails rather than a lift and apparently can accommodate fairly large vessels, including catamarans. The posted prices on the web site are extremely competitive, almost scarily so. Hard to imagine why it is cheaper to haul on Raiatea than in Mexico.

As is the case with many Polynesian islands, there is no bus service on Raiatea and only one taxi. The taxi actually isn't a taxi; It's a guy with a truck who sells his time and services for obscene amounts of money as a "tour guide". He will "tour" you from the carenage to downtown for a price that makes you consider buying a scooter as a viable economic alternative. Every time we end up in a situation like this -- far from anywhere with no buses or cabs -- we vow that on our next cruise we will travel with bikes. The good news is that Polynesians are friendly and fully cognizant of the limitations of their public transit system. While you will never see one of them hitchhiking, they are very willing to scoop up the wayward cruiser and drop them in town. Our 'lift' came from a really friendly guy named Steve (whose car smelled like gardinia) who not only took Jaime and I into town, he stopped, got out, and guided us down the street and up the dark stair case to our dentist. He was afraid (rightfully so!) we wouldn't have found it otherwise. He introduced us to the receptionist, with whom not surprisingly he was on a first name basis, and made sure we were all settled into the waiting room, before he returned to his vehicle.

Escaping the carenage, we spent a night in Baie d'Haamene. The bay cuts deeply into the heart of Taha'a and makes two jinks before terminating in a lovely, shallow and mud filled bay (S16 38.238 W151 29.157). The protection from waves and wind is so complete and the holding so good that this bay is considered a hurricane hole. DrC and I estimate it has the capacity to shelter at least twice as many vessels as Puerto Don Juan up in the Bay of LA (call it maybe 60) with potentially better protection. For us, the bay was a much needed respite after nearly two weeks in a 20 to 30 knot wind tunnel. For the first time in what felt like forever, the wind generator stopped it's whinging and we slept like the dead with no movement and utter silence.

(continued Part II)

Underway at Night

Some people sleep through night passages. They do this through the simple expedient of believing that the ocean is super big, and the probability of their hitting anything is very small. Single handers (who have no choice) and super optimistic others (who have a choice but like risk a bit more than we do) will set an alarm every 15 minutes or so, scan the horizon, check the radar, then drift back to sleep. Some even more thick folks have several glasses of wine with dinner before doing this.

On Don Quixote, we have the luxury of having someone awake, at the helm, all the time. At night, we are even more cautious than during the day as we assume someone else is ignoring the horizon, the little navigation lights on the front of our boat, the ping on their radar, and the incredibly loud sound of our air horn when we try to get their attention. We have reason to believe this is a Good Policy. Close calls between two boats at night at sea are not like horseshoes and hand grenades, they are more like nuclear bombs; Even being within sight of the flash is too close. During our years cruising, we have had our share of "two ships passing in the night." With the South Pacific crossing, we are statistically underway a much greater proportion of the time and so find this happening more frequently.

Night encounters seem to fall into roughly five basic categories: Behemoth, Ghost, Panga, Misplaced Lighthouse, and Yachtie. Let's take these in order.

A behemoth is a boat so damn big that hitting you is tantamount to a 16-wheeler smacking into a mosquito while crossing Minnesota. You and your boat will barely make a smear on the bow. If it happens off watch or at night, they might not even know they've hit you. Behemoths include tankers, cargo containers, and cruise ships. The bad news is that frequently, no one is paying the slightest attention on the helm. The good news is that virtually all behemoths are visible from many miles away, and legally all of them are required to broadcast over AIS their position, bearing, and name. Basically, your job is to spot them well in advance and get out of their way as quickly as possible.

A ghost is a return on your radar or a light on the horizon that doesn't respond when you call. Sometimes ghosts even disappear after you hail them. Ghosts come in many sizes, and it's pretty fair to assume that all of them are doing something illegal. While some are drug runners, by far the majority are poachers illegally fishing out of internationally established seasons or in prohibited locations. Alternatively, they are simply a product of your exhausted imagination. I hate ghosts. They scare the heck of me, particularly when they disappear off the radar. I don't like the fact that a well lit boat with a hard return on my radar less than 2 miles away suddenly disappears when I try to establish whether I will pass them on port or starboard. After the ghost disappears, you just have to assume they have full responsibility for avoiding a collusion.

Pangas are small, hard bottomed fishing boats. Technically, pangas are a very specific brand, size, and conformation. However, we've come to use the term to refer to any idiot fisherman or pearl farmer out in the middle of the night without lights in a very small boat. To make these guys even more fun and interesting, they inevitably trail strings of nets, lines, and other assorted crap in the water, also unmarked. Generally, they are too small to show up on your radar. The way they signal their existence is to shine a flashlight at you… assuming they see you… assuming they are even awake. The bad news about pangas is that they are a serious navigational hazard which can cause tremendous damage to your boat. The good news is that they are not really offshore craft. As a rule, you can assume that if you are 30 or more miles off shore, the only panga you'll encounter is someone who is dire need of a rescue. Pangas are yet one more excellent reason to avoid sailing at night near any land mass. The really dangerous part of sailing across an ocean, remember, is the hard bits on the edges.

On our boat, we call it a misplaced lighthouse when we see a light somewhere that makes not the slightest bit of sense. This sobriquet started the night Jaime and I spotted a lighthouse about 1000 miles off the coast of Mexico. It was very tall, rotated on a regular periodic schedule, and scared the bejesus out of both of us. We pulled out both electronic charts and the hard copy to make sure we were not encountering some hitherto unstudied island in the middle of nowhere. If you've ever visited an atoll, this notion is substantially more plausible. However, in this case, we have no idea what we were seeing. It was probably a ghost, actually. But I swear it looked like a lighthouse. We also call random lights in channels, along shorelines, and in the middle of nowhere misplaced lighthouses. We see few of them in French Polynesia, but the Mexican coastline is speckled with such lights which have broken from their moorings and drifted hither and yon.

And finally, there are your friends, neighbors and fellow travelers, the yachties. Honestly, these guys are sometimes the most dangerous bunch of all. You'd think given the size of the oceans and the relatively tiny wetted surface of the average sailing or motor yacht, it would be impossible to bump into another boat in the middle of nowhere. Yet it happens all the time! The only boat we've routinely had on our horizon has been our buddy boat, but over sundowners on the decks of fellow cruisers, we hear all sorts of first person encounters with yachts at sea. Of course, the most dangerous type harken back to the first paragraph of this essay -- the ones that are asleep. Alternatively, they might be below reading a book or watching a movie, secure in the perfection of their signaling radar, auto-pilot and charts. We on Don Quixote are a bit old school. We don't really trust our charts, we definitely don't trust our radar or the alarms programmed into it. We trust our eyes and our ears, and when the adults start to get sleepy, we willingly sacrifice our children to the cause and stick them up on the helm for the night.

Night watch can be some of the most beautiful, introspective, and meditative part of your passage making. Just make sure that you are on watch to enjoy it, as well as to avoid the chance of anything going bump in the night.

Distance is Relative

It's 2005. We've owned Don Quixote a mere two months. We would like to take her north to La Connor to show her off to DrC's parents. The girls want to visit their grandparents, and it seems like a great opportunity to practice sailing our new boat. The problem is that the trip is really really long. The 50 some odd miles are utterly daunting. So we break the trip into three days up, two days in La Connor, three days for the return. Even so, the 20 mile day to Everett is nearly overwhelming leaving the entire family limp with exhaustion.

It's 2007. What with closing down the practice, renting the house, and getting the boat ready, we just don't have a full week to spend on a trip to Grandma and Grandpa. We reconsider and recalculate and commit to leaving early and have long days. We can manage the distance two days each way. Thanks to some friends of ours, we've learned the wonders of using Puget Sound tides to carry us from place to place. The second, 27 mile day is hard on everyone and boring in the extreme, but we do it.

It's 2008. We cut the lines on our cruising lives and head north. We make it all the way to Port Townsend, 45 miles north, in one day push to make a scheduled appointment with a rigger. It takes all day. On arrival, we have the devil's own time docking as the family has collectively less than a single erg of energy. As the stars start to emerge from Northwest clouds, we drag ourselves down to the local microbrewery to eat burgers and drink crafted and ginger brew with a sense of accomplishment. 

It's 2009. To escape the heat and mud of Santa Rosalia after Hurricane Jimena, the girls and I pull out of the harbor in the middle of the night and motor sail 65 north to Bahia San Franciscito. We don't even have the captain on board. It takes 13 hours, and we arrive before sunset with plenty of time to set the hook well for the night. The next day we duplicate the effort to get up and around the corner into the Bay of LA region where presumably we are out of the possible path of another hurricane. I can't remember us at any time discussing the distance, as the trip was well within "our wheelhouse" and a hell of a lot easier than the days just spent on the dock in 70 to 90 knot winds.

It's 2011. The family is noodling over the charts covering the region from the Societies to Tonga. Jaime notes, "Aitutaki to Palmerston North is only 193. We can leave in the morning and get in the next evening." Aeron nods, "Easy peasy." Mera adds, "Only one night watch per person." 

I try to imagine this family back in the Puget Sound. Have we really changed so much? If we wanted to see Grandma and Grandpa, would we really consider leaving on Friday afternoon back on Sunday? The family is busy making plans for this summer in New Zealand with trips to the Bay of Islands and Hauraki Gulf, both of which are 100s of miles from our base in Auckland Harbor. Presumably, there will come a time when 100 miles seems like a long day again. But today, we are sailing from Huahine to Raiatea, and we don't even bother to plan when to leave or arrive. The trip is so short, it's hardly worth changing the daily cooking, school, and chore schedule. It's only 20 miles after all.

Changing Our Diet

When in Rome, eat pasta. When in Polynesia, eat bokchoy. Bokchoy is a fantastic vegetable with which I had almost no familiarity prior to our puddle jump. Shame on me. It is a cruiser's delight: cheap, crunchy, widely available, and it keeps a surprisingly long time in the fridge. The greens are good raw as a substitute for lettuce in salads and sandwiches. They are equally good sautéed as greens in a stir fry or as leafy green in soups and stews. The stems are tasty in any situation -- raw or cooked -- where normally you might otherwise use celery. But unlike celery and romaine, I find I can keep bokchoy in the fridge for up to two weeks with almost no noticeable change. We've never kept it longer as we use it up fairly rapidly. Bokchoy is now a staple of the Don Quixote diet and will remain so even after we arrive in more varied veggie ports.

Another addition to our diet is the pamplemousse. I've always wondered what these things were. They look like enormous green grapefruit, not particularly appealing and ridiculously large. I can't remember seeing them in the States, but they did appear in New Zealand stores with some degree of frequency. If the price is right, we'll continue munching on these globes long after we leave the South Pacific. One pamplemousse is enough to feed the entire family at lunch along with the ubiquitous baguette, a chunk of cheap brie-like cheese, and some stalks of bokchoy or carrots.

The common veggies with which we have had little contact and less interest include taro and breadfruit. After reading Herman Melville's description of his first encounter with breadfruit in Typee, I don't feel particularly guilty over this omission. There is also a red prickly fruit which looks a bit like a sea anemone and tastes gooey and sour with little mitigating flavor to make it worth eating. Locals love these, and they can be found at every corner stand, but I can't see the appeal. Lamentably, another extremely popular vegetable in Polynesia is Chinese eggplant. It too is widely available, cheap, and keeps well. Sadly, I loathe eggplant. The only way I can enjoy eggplant is breaded, fried, and buried deep in a casserole consisting of small bits of eggplant hidden between thick layers of cheese, spicy tomato sauce, spicy sausage, and pasta.

The kids are big fans of coconut. As a parent, I advocate cultivating coconut interest in your children while you travel. Coconuts are quite literally lying on the ground everywhere. Throw the children overboard armed with little more than a screw driver, and they will spend hours feeding themselves. Coconuts are very satisfying to harvest, shuck, crack and eat. Done properly, the process involves throwing things, making stuff fall out of trees, ripping, shredding and tearing something to bits, banging, whacking, smashing, chipping, scrapping, and shattering. The yield is incredibly pure, slightly sweet juice in a rewardingly large volume along with firm, crunchy coconut meat. If you have a scraper and a small piece of fabric, you can also make coconut cream which tastes like melted coconut ice cream. Don't let the kids bring coconuts back to the boat. The shucking process generates copious amounts of husk shreds that burst open in a startling display of dirty bark bits which then adhere to every surface for a distance of 5 meters -- in over words, at least half your boat. The bits then bond to the bottoms of cat and people feet and are tracked to every other horizontal surface on the boat. It takes weeks to de-coconut-huskify your boat. If your children insist on bringing coconuts back, have them husk the fruit before returning to the boat then stick the resulting nuts in a zip lock bag in the fridge. They won't be quite as fresh as unhusked nuts, but they are still tasty even a week or two later.

French Polynesia is the land of the cheap baguette. At first, we reveled in the crunchy white bread. After a few weeks, however, we're heartily sick of it. It's like eating French Wonder Bread. It fills you up but leaves you with the dissatisfying sensation that you've essentially been eating the wheat equivalent of cotton candy. Baguettes are available at every magazin in the entire country as long as you get there before 0700. We always make pre-orders at the magazin so we can go in the next day at whatever hour suits our fancy. If you keep your baguettes in a sunny, dry spot out of the way of moist, night breezes, they dry out perfectly. You can then make them into bread puddings, stuffing, or croutons with little effort. We also enjoy smearing them with a seasoned tomato paste, a bit of pepperoni and some cheese and baking them into pizza bites. I've taken pizza bites to potlucks many times. I have never ever made enough no matter how many I bake.

Buying meat in Polynesia is a bit bass backwards. Beef is extremely expensive, New Zealand lamb about the same as in New Zealand, and chicken from the United States pricey but within reach. The cheapest protein is sushi grade tuna which can be had at any major magazin or market for roughly 750 CP/kg ($4.15/pound). I know this sounds terrible, but we've taken to buying enormous chunks of tuna, slicing it into steaks, and freezing it for later use. While sometimes we make sushi, more often we grill the steaks and serve with chili sweet and spicy or wasabi/soy flavored sauces. Leftovers get made into sandwich spreads or even -- sacre bleu! -- tuna noodle casserole. You can also purchase meats in cans… any meats. I've never seen beef in a can before. I confess, we haven't bought it yet. Bad us. We should at least try it. However, I have no idea what to do with canned beef.

The girls report that French Polynesian candy and pastries don't really stand out. Aeron says that the banana fried in dough might be a tasty exception. Most everything, however, is a bit glutinous or just plain odd. The hard candy which tastes like honey dipped in a pine tree is particularly strange and more than a bit medicinal. Everything pales in comparison to the aforementioned coconut cream derived from the girls' hard effort and a shaver. Instead of sweets, the girls report that they most enjoy the abundant sushi with its sweet Polynesian soy sauce and the poisson cru which is white fish ceviched in lime juice and salty coconut milk. According to Mera, it's very odd and it goes down your throat in a "queasy way," but it tastes really good.

We eat a lot of Mexican package cookies, crackers, cereals, and canned goods. Sometimes I think we'll be munching meloras on Saltinas for the rest of our lives. We are going to arrive in New Zealand with roughly 100 casera salsa cans for the simple reason that we ran out of tortas, and there isn't a decent tortilla chip to be found anywhere in the South Pacific. This lack is probably okay since beer the local Hinano beer is $3/can and tastes terrible. We plan to just wait it out drinking rum cocktails and munching raw coconut and sashimi till we get to New Zealand. Rough culinary life.