Fw: Huahine ITI 16.47 S 150.59W

Salsa af Stavsnas
Ellinor Ristoff Staffan Ehde
Sat 10 Aug 2013 17:33
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There is a saying that sailors think that there are three kinds of wind: one that is to strong, one that is to weak and one that comes from the wrong direction.
According to the forecast we should have had the right amount of wind from the right direction.
We started out having not enought of wind, and we thought that might be due to the islands blocking it. We did catch up some by going down under the trail of clouds that are created by "mecanical elevation" on the islands. The wind brings moisture towards the mountains, when the air rises it cools and the moisture "falls out" to form clouds.
Can it be to little wind? With confused seas that makes it horrible. And confused seas it was.
Confused seas are waves crashing into each other from different directions. It makes you feel that you are a toy boat being tossed about by a baby playng in a bathtub.
Last night the wind started to pick up really strong, wich made us suspicius on the whole forecast.
As we entered the pass of Huahine the wind had picked up to 28 knots in the gusts. So we could see Bora Bora but decided to visit this island instead and go to Bora Bora when it has calmed down.
 
The geologi of these islands and atholls
Before we came here I thought I had an idea of what it would look like but I had it all wrong.Maybe you know if not...
To help you out, Marquesas are easy to understand, islands made from vulcanoes that erupted out of the sea.
Darwin had a theory, that as time goes by, these vulcano islands would wear down becoming an island surrounded by a corall reef. Thats what these society islands look like (Bora Bora, Huahine, Raiatea). You enter an atholl and in the middle is the big island, in this case actually two.
So once inside the atholl you can move around the island (if luck will have it with depth etc) fully protected by the reef.
In this case it can be a mile between the reef and the island.
Then as the islands fall back to the sea they end up as atholls, just a lagoon surrounded by a reef, and on the reef there are a pearl of islands (Mutos). That's the Tuamutos. Nobody could prove that Darwin was right unil the French started drilling in the atholls for nuclear bomb  testing. They went so deep they found the "island" under the atholl, and he was given right.
Clever guy... Darwin