Saturday 11th August - Moorea
17:30.75S 149:51.13W Saturday 11th August – Moorea We’ve seen a lot of very pleasant spots but Moorea defies superlatives. Having slipped at 1030 from Marina Taina in Tahiti and
faffed about in the Tahiti lagoon resolving the issue of chart plotter compact
flash cards we eventually got going through the
James having a hard time at the helm We had intended to anchor in an arm just inside the reef at the northern end of the bay in what is reputed to be the best anchorage. Unfortunately that reputation meant that it was extremely crowded. But we were somewhat committed because the anchor windlass had decided that it was prepared to let chain out but not recover it. Jon was pretty confident that he knew what the problem was and that it could be fixed fairly quickly once we’d anchored and he could devil about, upside-down, in the anchor locker with an electrical crimping set. But just in case that wasn’t the way it turned out, we needed somewhere pretty shallow initially so that if we had to recover the beast by hand . . . No sooner had we dropped the hook but we were treated to
some vocal and fairly detailed advice from the skipper of a San Franciscan yacht
concerning how close he thought we ought not to be to some other yacht which was
particularly near neither him nor us.
Anyway, we ignored that (as you learn to) and got on with sorting out the
problem. That done, at least
temporarily, we came back into the main arm of the bay and pushed off much
deeper into it to find ourselves a stunningly beautiful and secluded slot in a
little under 20m of water. Having
dropped Fubar the FBA and nearly 80m of chain into volcanic mud we were
confident that we were going nowhere.
Mount Mouaroa overlooking On Friday morning the divers were picked up by the local dive boat and went diving (see diving blog) whilst Jon made a ‘proper job’ of the electrical connections to the windlass.
Right that’s sorted – let me outta here That afternoon we all set off in the dinghy to do the mile and a half or so to the local village, Papetoai. This is where the dive boat was based and Arnamentia’s divers noted that the dive boat, with its fibre glass planning hull driven by a 200HP outboard engine, had conducted its business of getting them there and back through the gentle swell considerably less wetly and with a great deal more dash and élan than a rub-a-dub with 4 people aboard and driven by a 5HP outboard. On our way back to Arnamentia we were further humbled by a local in a va’a (outrigger canoe) keeping pace with us for a good ten minutes. At one point we thought we might ask him for a tow!
Man in a Va’a However, we got there and had a look about. To be brutally honest there really isn’t
much to see in the village. The
church may be the oldest Christian religious edifice in
Early in the morning of Saturday 11th Jon, James and Mira were collected to go snorkelling with whales, dolphins, sharks, stingrays and anything else of interest that could be found. This involved a fast trip by dive boat around much of the island (what amazing scenery!) and cutting at considerable speed through very shallow and narrow boat channels in the reefs through which no yacht could conceivably navigate. We did see a female humpback whale and her calf but they were too shy to allow us to get close enough to swim with them. We swam amongst grey and black-tipped sharks – here one’s own idea of personal space does become a bit of an issue sometimes. We were unlucky with dolphins but were surrounded in very shallow water – a few feet deep only – by dozens of stingrays who cuddled up to us as we held out enticing scraps of fish to attract them.
The Stingrays
The boys getting up close and personal
Whale emerging from the deep That done it was time to move on again – this time to
Raiatea, some 100NM to WNW away and one of the islands in the leeward group of
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