Toau-Moorea 14 avril 15° 48.2'S 146°09.1'W
Canopus 3 on the Blue Water Rally
Jean Michel Coulon
Mon 14 Apr 2008 07:33
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We indeed moved the boat to the Maitai Dream Hotel
for dinner on 11 April and found the public areas very pleasant, the maitais
under-rummed and overpriced, and the food good but, at least in my humble
opinion, not significantly better than where we had dinner the night
before. Our plan was to leave for Anse Amyot, at the opposite end of thre
neighboring atoll of Toau, no later than 0600 (12 April), and everyone was up
before then, but Michel discovered that he had left his backpack on the hotel
dock. Fortunately (not least because the backpack contained our
breakfast--at dinner we kept asking for additional dinner rolls, which Michel
squirreled away) it was still there, and despite the delay we were on our way
only 10 minutes late.
Marc the Fakarava dive master went on at length one
day about French Polynesia having the greatest gap between prices charged and
service offered of any area in the world. That may be the case in general
(our experience is far too incomplete to judge), but it certainly does not apply
in Anse Amyot. As we approached the entrance to the cul-de-sac we could
see members of the family waiting for us in an outboard--as it turned out, two
daughters, including one of the two we had met two nights ago, a son, and a
very happy dog--with whom we had arranged to reserve moorings and dinner.
The Swedish boat (Pelle V) was just ahead of us and was promptly escorted to a
mooring and handed the mooring pennant. When it was our turn we were given
a pennant that could secure a vessel many times our size and invited to come
ashore well before dinner to look around and meet the rest of the family.
The Danish boat was less than a mile behind.
Once the boat was settled I went snorkeling in the
area along the shore from Canopus out to where the pass cuts through the reef
and, though the water clarity was significantly below the best we have seen in
the Tuamotus, the coral pinnacles shelter amazing numbers of fish and I had
a few more first-evers: a stingray (probably no wider than 3-4 feet); two
(not just one) Napoleons, one considerably larger than the other; a school of
1.5-inch fish that from most angles appeared a light electric blue but seemed
yellow when the sun's rays were at a particular angle; a school of 18-inch long
fish that had the shape of tuna but were two-toned (as in two horizontal bands
of color, the darker one above a white or gray belly) and would not let me get
close enough to determine the dominant color; and what I assume was a type of
angel fish about five inches long and at least as wide from belly to tip of
dorsal fin (it actually looked like one dorsal fin, minus fish), with bands of
light brown, dark brown, black, and white running about 30 degrees off the
vertical, and what looked like a frayed edge of the top of its outsized dorsal
fin that was bright yellow. At one point a blacktip roughly five feet long
suddenly entered my angle of vision but kept his distance.
Dinner at the pension that night consisted of a
variety of seafood dishes, including a very good poisson cru in coconut milk
that met Jean-Michel's high standards for that dish, octupus, and clams (the
heretofore mysterious bivalves--there were the purple and blue "lips" lurking in
the appetizing sauce). But it was hardly a "chaude soirée"--it turns out
that a now ousted uncle used to run the pension and was a heavy drinker; current
management has been in charge for three years and still has not gotten a license
to serve wine and beer, so we all (Swedes, Danes, and us) brought our own.
When Jean-Michel learned about the pension's inability to serve alcohol he
invited the other two boat crews over for our pale imitation of the drinks and
food Pelle V had served us in Makemo--at least we could offer more than beer and
wine, and our experimental (we had not tried it) container of sangria
disappeared quickly.
Today (13 April) our choices were to leave for
Moorea or go on a pension-organized outing to a motu in Toau's lagoon;
Jean-Michel and I left the decision up to Michel, Jean-Michel because he knows
Moorea well and I because I will have time to see it both before and after you
arrive, and Michel chose the motu. The islet, which had a diameter
not much greater than 150 feet, was beautiful not least because of its abundance
of shade-providing palm trees. There were many birds, including one that
was black except for a white stripe on the top of its head; smaller and
sleeker than a dove, the bird had two standard calls, whistling and
chattering. But the best thing about the islet aside from the absence of
mosquitoes and nonos was the view across the lagoon--the water was extremely
shallow (so much so that I chose not to go snorkeling) and seemed to reveal
every possible shade of turquoise. At one point small blacktip sharks
appeared just off shore, apparently waiting for scraps from our lunch; soon
thereafter a large number of baby blacktips began swimming within a few inches
of the shore.
Lunch, which included just-speared fish, was
sub-par, and a visit to a nearby motu to hunt for an odd-looking relative of the
langouste called a varo (pale, almost translucent white and with tiny
claws, it lives in burrows in shallow water and apparently is very tasty)
yielded only one. In addition to the three boat crews, a Danish couple
staying at the pension, the obese woman running the pension (when I helped her
back into the boat after she had gone looking for varo, she almost pulled me
over the side), her teenage daughter (no tatoos yet, but a stud in her belly
button), her daughter-in-law and two three-year-old twin boys, and two sons
(to drive the boat and shoot the fish), our party included the seven guests
plus cook from an Archipels Croisières catamaran that arrived early this
morning; my wife and I plan several of the islands adjacent to Tahiti on an
Archipels catamaran. Judging from the guests, the Tahiti travel agency's
suggestion that the catamaran cruises appeal above all to young people is a bit
off--the only person below 60 was the adult son of a (seemingly very nice)
French Canadian couple.
We plan to leave Anse Amyot at 0500 tomorrow (14
April) for Moorea and expect to arrive on the
15th. |