Pitufa.at

I know it must sound ridiculous, but at the moment we’re faced with more decisions than a stressed out stock broker. We were trying to find a weather window for our next destination Makemo which lies just 60 miles northeast of here (or 75 to the other pass, or 100 going round the western side). We spent hours pondering different options looking at grib files and tide tables, but no matter how we turned it, wind direction (shifting), wind speed (first too rough then dying on us), arrival time (during daytime) and slack water for both passes just never worked out. We also didn’t like the fact that the French weather forecast mentioned grains (squalls) ‘debordant’–we had to look that up and neither ‘brimming over’ nor ‘bursting with’ sounded promising in combination with weather… We were not too keen on venturing out into confused seas (it’s been blowing for a while and the wind’s been shifting now), squally weather and the high chance of running out of wind along the way being tossed around in the still rough sea. Instead we decided to just quickly sail across the lagoon to sit out the wind shift to the south in a protected anchorage. Nice theory, but in the end we got all the stuff we had thought to avoid postponing the passage, just on a smaller scale within the lagoon. Mid distance a series of squalls with about 30 knots got us, all bearing points disappeared in a wall of rain, stopping was no option as we would have been blown off our safe GPS track, so we had to continue cautiously with the helmswoman wishing she was wearing diving goggles to see the chart plotter just in front of her. In the end we were lucky though, the wind turned south earlier than predicted, so we’re finally cosy in one of our favourite spots, Makemo will have to wait a few more days

There is another of Birgit’s articles in the current issue of Ocean7. This time it’s about general cruising life.

Birgit Hackl, Christian Feldbauer: Cruisen — Leben unter Segeln, OCEAN7 06 (November/Dezember) 2014, p. 30–35. download PDF (in German only)

We’ve already been a month on Tahanea, and we’re still not getting bored. Even though we get up at sunrise at 6 the days are not long enough to fit in everything we’ve got (and want) to do. Those of you who know us personally won’t be surprised that many of our activities circle around food and its preparation. Baking bread, tending to the boat garden, sprouting lentils and mung beans, excursions to collect coconuts on a motu–until we’ve found some coconuts that are not just of the right ripeness, but also at an approachable height can take a while. Opening them, getting the water out, spooning out the flesh, blending everything back on the boat–a well earned cocktail Little repairs and improvements on boat and equipment that used to slide down on the to-do list get attention now (a sunbrella pyjama for the outboard tank, another one for the railing BBQ, repairing the leaking kayak, etc.) Because of the frequent wind changes we’ve got to have a little sail to another anchorage every few days where we still find something new and exciting.

We usually don’t fish in lagoons. First, because we enjoy watching colourful reef fishies more than eating them and second, in many parts of the tropics reef fish and their predators have ciguatera, a nerve poison that accumulutes in fish, is harmless for them, but harmful to mammals. Some atolls are said to be free of ciguatera, some kinds of fish too (at least small specimen of them) and the locals are supposed to know, but then we’ve met locals who got it nevertheless. Anyway, as we’ve been here on Tahanea for a while, we thought it would be a good idea to use the predicted light northeasterly wind and the calm seas to venture out through the pass, sail Pitufa for a few hours trolling our lures, catch a fish and come back in. To be on a favourable tide we set the alarm clock to 4:30 this morning and sailed out at 6 o’clock. Of course we got much stronger winds and rougher seas than predicted and after being tossed around for three hours we’d gained nothing but a salty-all-over boat from the spray and a seasick cat. Great. Just when sailing back in through the pass we finally had something on the lure–a well-sized tuna! We’ll have sushi today, poisson cru, BBQ and a curry for the following meals

Neighbouring islands like Fakarava attract tourists with drift dives through ‘walls of sharks’. We suppose that the resorts feed the sharks to get such numbers, because here without fishermen cleaning their catch or other attractions we see some sharks on every snorkel or dive, but never big groups. In the passes we saw some black-tip and grey reef sharks and a white-tip reef shark resting on the bottom (a normal behaviour during day time for them, unlike many other sharks who constantly have to swim to have water streaming through their gills they can breathe actively). Curious young black-tip reef sharks inspect the dinghy and Pitufa wherever we go and while diving a bommie and in the pass we saw some of the bigger grey reef sharks–fortunately all of them mildly interested, but not aggressive. The funniest encounter we had with a nurse shark who we almost accidentally ran over with the dinghy while he/she was resting/sunbathing(?) in about 30 cm deep water right next to a beach. The next day we saw (presumably) the same shark in the same spot, but this time tangled and knotted up with a companion rolling around in the shallow water with bellies, snouts and fins alternatingly sticking out of the water. They didn’t notice us at all and concentrated fully on their mating ritual

This morning dawned completely calm (dawn’s around half past four, we’re in a funny time zone…). Without the constant noise of the wind and just the far thundering of the outer reef (the reef’s so broad here that the breakers are about half a mile away) we could clearly hear the sounds of the awakening motu next to us. The chirping, squeaking, cackling, shrieking and squawking reminded us of the South American jungle?we’d never have expected such a cacophony on a supposedly ‘barren piece of coral rubble’ (as cruising guides described Tahanea). Some of the sounds were surprisingly unbirdlike, like the roaring of a boar and a mechanical winding-up noise (even though we walked around yesterday and are quite sure that there’s no pigs or giant clocks around). Most likely it’s the nesting boobies squabbling with their neighbours. There’s another quarrelsome species that could be the origin of the weird sounds: a small, white bird that’s common throughout French Polynesia. As we c ouldn’t identify them, we named the weightless, translucent seeming creatures Southsea-Fairies. Observing their rowdily behaviour we soon renamed them Southsea-Bully-Fairies

Most cruisers hop quickly through the Tuamotus, only spending a few days on one atoll before heading to the next. We imagine that when they see the first one they think ‘wow, it’s round and flat with coconut palms!’ at the second one ‘aha, round and flat’ and the third ‘hmm, suprise, round and flat’ and so on . We’ve been in Tahanea now for three weeks, exploring around the lagoon and each motu seems actually quite different. Some consist of coral rubble, some are sandy, the vegetation of palm trees, pandanus, catchbird trees, tree heliotrope, grass and smaller shrubs varies quite a bit, some have bird colonies, other lots of coconut crabs–on each excursion we find something new. It’s also nice to have GPS tracks all over the lagoon to anchorages that are protected in different wind directions, so we could safely make our way in an emergency (sudden wind shift) even on an overcast day where the reefs are virtually invisible under the silvery surface of the sea. Today we motorsailed up to the northern reef again, because the weather forecast predicts that a trough will move by soon with the wind clocking round.

Doing a drift dive or a drift snorkel in the pass of an atoll is a magical experience: you take the dinghy out against the incoming tide, hop into the deep azure of the Pacific and watch the underwater world glide by while the crystal clear ocean water sweeps you back into the lagoon. The coral on the walls and even on the bottom of the 15 to 3 metre deep pass is wonderfully healthy and intact, colourful fish hover over their hiding places, always keeping an eye on the nosy black-tip, white-tip and grey reef sharks. These sharks of course also came to inspect the funny eight-legged turtle that drifted several times through the pass today and yesterday–our dinghy with 4 people holding on to it Our friends Bonnie and Paul on Romany Star only have a few weeks left on their visa (American are only allowed 3 months in French Polynesia) and had to keep watching the gribs for a weather window to sail to the Marquesas. As we knew we wouldn’t have much time together, we fit lots of activities into the past four days: a dive around a bommie, some drift snorkels, a nightly hunt for coconut crabs that ended up in Vietnamese spring rolls the next evening, dinners on Romany Star and Pitufa and Bonnie even found the time to cut my hair–the first professional hair cut I’ve had in years, even though she’s not a coiffeur, she practiced a lot on her sister and I gained from that experience Today they’ve left for the Marquesas, we sailed Pitufa back to the Southeast corner (anticipating southeasterly winds). It looked like we had this part of the blue disk only for ourselves, but in the afternoon a French boat showed up, so we’re not the only people on the atoll.

Between Tahiti and the Ile Gambier the Pacific is adorned with almost 80 turquoise-white rings–the Iles Tuamotu. These atolls are the remnants of volcanic islands that have long sunk back into the sea, leaving only the fringing reef with its little islands on top behind. Many of the Tuamotus have gaps in their barrier reef, the passes that allow sailing ships to slip into the calm waters of the lagoons. Using those passes can be tricky at times, especially when a high swell fills up the lagoon there can be strong currents (on some islands up to 20 knots), standing waves and eddies. We were lucky, the entrance to Tahanea is fairly wide, we picked the right time (you have to take tides and swell into consideration) and slid effortlessly in. After a night in an anchorage right next to the pass we crossed the lagoon (Tahanea is 24 miles long and 8 miles wide)–a nice sail in flat calm waters, but Christian kept a sharp lookout from the bow all the time, because navigating here is not without dangers. On a satellite picture the lagoon looks like a dark blue night sky with countless stars glittering in it. These ‘stars’ are coral heads that grow from the 30 metre deep bottom of the lagoon almost vertically to the surface. We found a pretty anchorage on a sandy shelf next to SV Romany Star (we met Bonnie and Paul already in Tahiti) and yesterday we took the dinghies back to the nearest coral head together and did a dive around that ‘bommie’. What had been a threatening keel-ripping-off rock the day before, turned into an underwater paradise with colourful hard coral and swarms of unicorn, surgeon and parrot fish.