A safe arrival in Papeete, Tahiti

Oceania » French Polynesia » Tahiti » Papeete
June 23rd 2008

Published: June 23rd 2008

Edit Blog Post

sailmarnie

Anaho Bay on Nuku Hiva

May 30
OK, here’s the text that did NOT get uploaded to the blog in the Marquesas.
Well, we’ve been living on the boat for about four months now, we’ve sailed over 5,000 nautical miles together, and we’re all still friends! We left the Galapagos over two months ago, spending 22 days at sea on the crossing to the Marquesas Islands. At 3,210 nautical miles, that will be our longest ocean passage between home and New Zealand. (A nautical mile is 6,000 feet, a bit longer than a statute mile, so that works out to almost 3,700 of the more familiar land miles… a long way to be out of sight of land.)

The Marquesas are the youngest of the French Polynesian island groups, steep volcanic islands that have not existed long enough to develop rings of surrounding coral reef. While all related, formed in the same geologic process and time frame, each island has its own character. Here are a few notes on the five islands we visited.

Our first landfall was Fatu Hiva, the southernmost and least populated of the six main islands, where Thor Heyerdahl spent a year living in the jungle on the first of

Catch of the day

Catch of the day...Walter with his wahoo!

his celebrated south sea adventures. We got well initiated in the art of “wet landings,” actually capsizing the dinghy on our first trip ashore. We’ve since become much more adept at negotiating the surf as it breaks onto the boulder beaches commonly found here. On Hiva Oa we completed immigration formalities with the French Gendarmes, and visited an archaeological site containing the largest carved stone “tikis” this side of Easter Island. The island of Tahuata was formed not as erupted cones, but as broken layers of the ocean floor uplifted by subsurface volcanic activity, yielding much steeper cliffs which accentuate the isolation of small communities tucked into deep valleys. There we found some of the Marquesas’ finest artisans, carving in stone, bone and wood. A surplus of jellyfish put a bit of a damper on our swimming, but all the fish feeding on the jellies attracted a group of several dozen dolphins who spent an entire day with us in Hapatoni Bay, slowly crossing back and forth around our anchorage, doing dolphin gymnastics between feeding forays. Ua Pou had the most dramatic landscape, with a cluster of great spires of rock jutting up several thousand feet from the center of

Cyril the tatooed bone carver- (not a cannibal)

the island, like huge crystals in an enormous mineral specimen. Theory has it that these basaltic spires formed and cooled below the surface of the ocean, later being uplifted above sea level to form the island. Nuku Hiva, the largest island, is a single volcanic cone made up of a series of concentric ridges surrounding the flooded crater which forms Taiohae Bay, site of the capital of the Marquesas. Among the many deep and sheltered bays around the island is Taipi valley, scene of Herman Melville’s sojourn among the cannibals which he chronicled in his first book, Typee. The practice of eating people has long since been abandoned, but vestiges of the fierce Marquesan warrior culture can be seen in the beautifully tattooed faces and bodies of many of the local folk. The effect is quite striking when an athletic young man rows by in his outrigger canoe, tattoos completely covering one half of his body, in designs accentuating the bones and muscles of his face and torso.

After leaving the Marquesas, we’ve since spent a couple weeks in the next island group, the Tuamotus. Completely different from the high-profile volcanic islands of the Marquesas, the Tuamotus are a

Derrold's original dream- Heyerdahl's book on Fatu Hiva

scattering of coral atolls rising only a few feet above sea level. They were long considered a hazardous place to sail because, unlike a mountainous island looming on the horizon, the atolls are difficult to see from any distance and many ships have been wrecked by running aground on the reefs. With modern GPS navigation we were not taken by surprise that way, but still practiced very careful navigation. The Tuamotus presented a new set of challenges for our sailing skills, and a very different landscape to explore.

Internet access has been unimaginably painfully laboriously frustratingly slow. We’ve now arrived in Papeete, and finally found internet connectivity capable of uploading to the blog. Hope to post again before leaving Tahiti, to give you an update on our time in the Tuamotus and Society archipelagos.

Additional photos below

Photos: 26, Displayed: 24