Kauehi, Tuamotu's
Quartermoon
Mike Share & Sammy Byron
Fri 4 Jun 2010 03:52
|
Well we made it into Kauehi nice and safe after
slowing down to a painful 3 knots overnight. The last 30 nm's was eerily flat
and calm, like we were on a lake; pretty extreme differences in sea state over
12 hours or so - that's not to say unwelcome or unpleasant!
 (Mike's
dream house)
Our calculations appeared to be spot on (still
amazed...) as we arrived at the pass minutes after slack water - confirmed
by a few yachts waiting to exit the lagoon. We said a few quick
passing hello's and motored through and headed on up to the village. En route we
called our Aussie mate's up who were heading up to meet us from south in
the lagoon; they turned out to be in convoy with a guy from my
secondary school in Sonning - weird huh? We met Greg & Leisha in
Panama, an Aussie couple a bit younger than us that had been working in
Manchester. They are on a Vancouver 27' - a great little boat (no fridge!)
that they brought to sail at the weekends in UK. They left for France on a
checkout sail and are now heading back to Sydney - how cool is
that?!?!
 Anchoring was painful, there are so many coral
heads in these lagoons that the chain keeps getting caught up in them -
this can result in broken chains in bad weather so not really what you
want to be dealing with when a storm comes through in the middle of the
night. Greg & Leisha came over and told us how they had
dragged anchor on the same night whilst we were getting battered at sea.
They had dragged a way into the lagoon and luckily missed a few reefs on
the way! In celebration of both boats and crew being in one piece we cracked
open a bottle of Abuelo Rum (Panama's finest) and that was the end of that
day ;-)
Kauehi is a beautiful "small" atoll at a mere 8
miles long with about 200 inhabitants. There's a church, 2 small shops, an
airstrip and that's about it. The rest of the atoll is sand/coral beaches
inside, lush coconut groves for a few hundred metres then very rough dead
coral (ex-seabed) until the live coral shelf that plunges a few thousand
metres into the Pacific.
 These atolls are still unsurveyed for the most part
so a lot of boats tend to anchor at a safe, known location. If you want to get
some private reefs and a stretch of a few miles of white sand to yourself, you
need to go venturing elsewhere. With this in mind we set of into the NE corner
of the lagoon with G&L - luckily they have mast steps to spot the coral
heads that lurk just below the surface - rising up from 30 metres or so. It's
quite freaky to find a tiny reef just waiting to take your keel off when you're
not paying attention..... However the flip side is the snorkeling around them is
amazing - pristine coral and tons of fish life as it seems no one ever goes
there. The fish life and coral was incredible, so many fish, sharks and
tame as well.
We spent 4 days at a few different spots and had
some great fires on the beach. We planned to cook lobster and coral trout but
couldn't find the first and were too scared of ciguatera fish poisoning for the
latter! Even so we had a pretty good feed with cheese filled damper, tuna
parcels with ginger and chili, homemade coleslaw and jacket spuds. Luckily
we ran out of booze on the beach, so we were all feeling okay the next
day!
 (Greg (Bush
Tucker man) & Leisha) |