Author: cruisingrunner

Everyone has heard of Tahiti and Bora Bora, and these are both amazing places, but The Society Island chain also has so much more to offer.  There are about 12 islands in the chain spread out over 400 miles in a WNW to ESE direction.  They are mostly volcanic islands with fringing reefs, so they are in between The Marquesas and The Tuamotus in their life cycle, and geographically are the best of both worlds.  The passes in and out of the reefs are far less daunting than in the Tuamotus, but once inside, the anchorages are flat and calm, unlike The Marquesas, since the reef protects you from the swell and fetch from the ocean outside.  The volcanic islands are worn remains of once tall volcanic islands, so they aren’t quite as breathtaking as The Marquesas, but they still offer a dramatic landscape, and there are many opportunities for walking and hiking. 

The islands are roughly broken up into 2 groups: the windward islands, including Tahiti and Moorea, and the leeward islands, including Huahine and Bora Bora.  These names originate from the fact that they all lie in the trade wind belt where the winds predominantly blow east to west.

In all, we visited 6 of these islands in the following order: Tahiti, Moorea, Huahine, Bora Bora, Maupiti, and Maupihaa (aka Mopelia).  We skipped Raiatea and Tahaa, which are both common stops on the cruising circuit. We traded our time for stops at Maupiti and Mopelia, which are lesser visited islands, partly due to their remoteness, and partly due to the reputations of the passes, which unlike the rest of the society islands, can have a wicked current and can be dangerous at times.

On our Pacific crossing we started our own little radio net, just Exodus, Lady Carolina, Chara, and True Blue V.  We’ve kept it up all this time, and we have other participants come and go, but it’s still mostly just our core group.  Well, except for Chara, who is having trouble with their SSB, and they can only receive, not transmit, so we always say hi to them, even though they can’t say hi back.

We learned about a larger net called the “Goodbye Isabella” net, which was started by a group of boats when they were leaving the Galapagos.  Field Trip net controls, and True Blue V participates regularly, since there are also lots of other Aussies on it, but although I’ve participated a few times, I just can’t get motivated to tune in every day.  I really have no idea what happened to our PPJ net that was started by the group of boats leaving Banderas Bay, but I haven’t asked anyone either.

I told Alex the other day that I really don’t want to be a net controller again.  So, if anyone ever asks me, I wanted him to remind me that I really don’t want to.  I had enough of that in Mexico.

June 1, 2014

Way back when we made the drive in a rental van from Santa Rosalia to San Diego and back, Tim had purchased three paddle boards: two inflatable and one rigid.  I was annoyed that he spent that much money on three, I mean why did we need three?  It’s not like a paddle board is the kind of thing you need to carry a spare of, right?  In fact, one of the inflatables never even made its way out of the locker it was stored in, that is, until we were in Tahanea.

Carolina and I had gone for a paddle, and I had used the rigid board, since it’s a little less stable than the inflatable one, and that night, for some reason, the boards were left in the water.  We try to enforce the rule that the boards get brought up and secured at night, and along with raising the dinghy, that responsibility falls on Alex and Brenden.  The next morning when I got up, the rigid board was gone.  This was one of those rare circumstances where I wished we were anchored on a lee shore, but it was not to be.  The wind was blowing along the long axis of the atoll, so the board could be 20 miles away by now, bashing against the coral on the other side, or even worse, out in open ocean.  Tim and Alex took the dinghy to go look for it, but it was a fruitless dinghy ride from hell.  The ride out was OK but coming back they were bashing into huge swells.  I got chastised for not tying the paddle board up correctly, and I chastised right back that the boards need to be brought up each night. 

Anyway, all hope wasn’t lost yet.  On our way back to the anchorage near the pass, we saw some guys with a panga (hey, I thought this atoll was uninhabited!?), so we dropped the dinghy while underway and Tim dinghied over to talk to them while the boys and I proceeded to the anchorage in Exodus.  Tim arranged to trade some gasoline for them to give him a ride to the other side of the atoll where the board might be.  A deal was struck, and Alex, Steve, and Kyle went along too and made an adventure out of it.  Although they made some new friends, they had no luck finding the paddle board.

I like to think that the board is now in the hands of some Polynesian kids who have so much fun with it that it makes it worth it that we gave it up.  We have since blown up the other inflatable, so we have two ready to use again.  And I added the item, “make sure paddle boards are up,” to my nightly checklist, and now they always come up.

When leaving the dock at the village in Makemo, we had a little bit of drama… we had bow anchor down and were stern tied to the wharf and good fortune had it such that the wind was blowing dead astern, so theoretically it would be an easy departure.  Throw off the dock lines (we had help on the dock for that) and then just get pushed by the wind over the anchor as we raise it.  No problem, right?  Well, Alex wasn’t being quite as careful as he should have been, and he jammed the anchor bridal hook up against the bow roller and the windlass fuse blew.  I’m at the helm, and Tim tells me we have to raise the anchor manually, so “just hold us right here.”  Well, some might think that with two engines holding Exodus in precisely one spot would be easy.  And it is, in very light wind conditions.  But with huge windage and very little keel, once the wind is over about 8 kts we get pushed around pretty good.  And this day it was blowing 15-20.  So, I try my best, but we do end up getting blown sideways a bit, so my great idea is to just turn, drive back to line we were on, and then face the anchor again.  In the process of doing that, I wrapped the chain around a coral head.  What a fiasco.  Tim had to jump in the water to free the chain, and at this point I just turned us around to face the wind so once free of the coral head we just floated back bow to the wind and raised the anchor manually (with help from Steve from Lady Carolina who had jumped in the water and boarded Exodus) in a more normal wind orientation for anchor raising.  So, I was ready for my rum right there, but we still had 3 hours of navigating through the coral heads to the next anchorage.  I dipped into the Zaya for that safe arrival cocktail, to be sure!

There is actually a breaker switch for the anchor windlass, but if you recall, that failed on us while we were still in Mexico, and Steve and Tim rigged up a “fuse monster” so that we could operate the windlass while still having the protection not to overdrive the windlass.  This incident in Makemo highlighted a problem with fuses. When they blow, they need to be replaced, but if we had a functioning breaker switch, we could have just thrown the switch and been back in business.  It turns out we actually DID have a replacement breaker switch, and we had had it for quite a while, we just hadn’t gotten around to replacing it.  Needless to say, that jumped up immediately to the top of Tim’s to do list.

While not quite as serious as when Alex had a run-in with a jellyfish in The Marquesas, Brenden’s encounter with a sea urchin in Makemo had every bit of the drama.  He was playing on and around the wharf with several of the Makemo kids, when he showed up on Exodus’s back step crying and in distress.  He showed me the tip of his forefinger, which had 5 dark, pinprick sized holes, and he told me he was attacked by a sea urchin. 

I decided to hide my amusement for the moment, because he was clearly not in the mood to be teased about attacking sea urchins, so we put vinegar on it to try to neutralize the venom.  One of the kids on the dock went to get someone and came back with a French woman who used to be the nurse.  Her advice was that after the pain wears off you just leave it alone, and his body would expel the pieces of the urchin in time.  Turns out this is pretty much what happened, although we kept a close watch on it for infection.  When each one seemed close enough to the surface Brenden would pick it out with a needle and tweezers.  I think it took over a month for all 5 of them to work their way out.