The “Soggy Paws Compendium” became our primary source of information and waypoints for the Tuamotus. Basically, this is an informal guidebook put together by a cruiser (s/v Soggy Paws). They have gathered input from various cruisers and blogs over the years and have organized it into a document for other cruisers to use. They have a compendium for most island groups in The South Pacific, but I had an abundance of guidebooks for The Marquesas, so I really didn’t delve into the compendium too much. That changed for The Tuamotus. All I had was Charlie’s Charts for Polynesia, which in general hasn’t been that helpful for anywhere because the chartlets are hand drawn and hard to read, the information is usually outdated, and the information on the passes are usually just worst-case stuff. Also, the French Polynesia guidebook I bought in Hiva Oa only covered the most heavily visited motus and didn’t even include the ones we wanted to visit.
So, the compendium provided us with a lot of firsthand accounts of the atolls, and in many cases even included anchor waypoints. We are grateful to the cruisers who came before us who took the time to write up their experiences and even more grateful to Soggy Paws who collected the information and made it available to everyone else.
Gresham Family Exodus 