Baie d'Avea - Huahine - French Polynesia.
Nina
Steve and Lynda Cooke
Sat 4 Jun 2016 22:00
Baie d'Avea - Huahine - French Polynesia.
The trip down inside the reef is not without its challenges. 1 knot of current is just enough when combined with 15 knots of wind on the nose, and shoaling reef with narrow passes.
We had Lynda and Karen on the bow as spotters, shouting where the colour changed ahead, darker blue for the deeper water, lighter blue for the shallow bits, turquoise for the really shallow bits, and even brown where the reef was at the surface. Peter was on the Chartplotter zoomed right in, and Steve at the wheel, as we wound our way through some very narrow gaps through the coral. Poles and perches marked the reef, standing on bases of concrete set onto the coral at the shallow parts. Red port cans on the top of the inside channel, green cones on top of the outside of the channel (reef side), with the odd cardinal poles thrown in. Thank you French hydro-graphic department, who have done a good job of charting all these areas (selling the charts to Navionics for our chart plotters) and marking the reefs in places. We can live with them all being in French for the area. The old admiralty charts are notorious for being at best sketchy, and at worst dangerous and wrong. (they were charted in the 17th century, and depths checked by dragging by chain, so not much wonder!).
Baie d'Avea
After a couple of hours, we came to the very south of the island, a beautiful sandy bay, the wide coral reef stretching around he outside, with its turquoise water, and a long 10m sand bottom for the whole of the area up to the beach. Good holding, and a very good anchorage. A small restaurant and a hotel, with its very friendly dinghy dock sticking out into the water.
Do Over and Paw Paw were already anchored towards this side of the bay.