It is now 17.36 on the 31st and there has been a slight change of plans - we indeed left Nuku Hiva's Taaoa Bay, but only to motor roughly four miles west along the coast to Anse Hakatea, one of two small bays within the larger Taioa Bay.  Hakatea is known among cruisers as Daniel's Bay, after a local who for decades lived here and had rigged a buoy-suspended hose in the bay that tapped a spring of fresh drinking water near his house; he made the water available to cruisers in exchange for modest gifts.  Alas, the Survivor TV program decided his bay was ideal for the series and bought him out under quasi-coercive conditions (the producers had won the support of Papeete and the Nuku Hiva government), then razed his house to create the atmosphere of isolation along the shore they sought.  It will be our first very quiet anchorage as the bay is very sheltered, with a dogleg blocking our view of the ocean. On three sides we are surrounded by steep cliffs of basalt of varying height with skimpy vegetation which nonetheless attracts songbirds we can easily hear from the boat, while on the fourth side there are two white sand beaches divided by a tiny peninsula.  Behind the beaches, which are infested by nonos (very tiny nasty biting flies), are cocoa palm plantations, smoke from a farmer's efforts to burn palm debris, and somewhere in the distance an allegedly impressive waterfall. 

 

Tomorrow most of the Rally boats will come here either for a few hours for a picnic or to stay overnight before a reasonably tough 2.5 hour hike (one way) to the waterfall, but we will be on our way to Hakahau Bay on Ua Pou (supposedly pronounced Wa Poo).  No later than the following morning we will head for Makemo in the Tuamotus, taking the easternmost of the three main routes through the archipelago.  The advantage of our route is that it does not foreclose going to any of the atolls that our guidebooks suggest we would enjoy seeing--once in Makemo (getting there may take 3-4 days) we will enjoy the luxury of taking it a day at a time as we decide where to go next.

 

The briefing this morning was the typical quasi-classroom situation of having to listen to information already made available, in this case in the Rally's guide; those of us who had read the guide and related materials thus wasted a morning.  Jean-Michel and I fell in that category, while Michel had a more productive morning of grocery shopping.  Shortly before lunch we learned that the cooking gas cannister we had left to be filled, and which had been promised for this morning, would not be available until around 1700 at the earliest.  Fortunately, Michel spotted one of two filled cannisters belonging to another French boat and arranged for them to take ours in exchange for one of theirs.  We then all had lunch at a shack opposite the dingy landing where the other boat's crewmembers had been eating every day--my first dish of poisson cru au coco was delicious as well as cheap.