sailing maloo: heaven is in the lee of the reefs...

after a mixed 3nighter we arrived in our first atoll of the tuamotus - kauehi.

the entrance into and within those coral-surounded bits of still water can be quite nerve wrenching.

imagine an empty bowl with one hole somewhere. now try to put this bowl in a bathtub...and through the one hole a lot of water under quite some pressure will run into the bowl until the waterlevel on the inside and outside of bowl and bathtub are equal.

now imagine that this one hole is more like an indent in the rim...and there you got a reef being the rim of the bowl and a pass through a reef.

with the changing currents lots of water either enters or leaves through that pass making currents up to 10kn (as we experienced) of speed that is visible miles outside the pass in the open ocean, a tidal bore.

so we waited for "slack water" - the little time window when the tide changes and the currents come to a halt.

we got in through the pass about 1h befor slack water and had app. 2kn of current against us - but maloo and penta did well and we flew in not quite sure what to expect.

all of a sudden the swell was gone - the water was flat and we started navigating to our designated anchor spot. in the middle of the atoll the water is rather deep - around 40m... just when we left the center to get closer to the shore the sealevel rose to about 10m spotted with "bommies" (i.e. coral heads that come sometimes right up to the surface, sometimes lurk under water waiting for one nice boathull to hit them)

so you would have seen me standing on the bow staring into the water and giving mark directions to navigate us through the labyrinth of coral heads. an hour later we were confronted for the very first time trying to anchor between the bommies. the problem here you want to avoid is the anchor chain getting wrapped around those corals as the shifting wind moves the boat around. with the scope decreasing there has been cases of windlasses being ripped out of the hull... so definitely something to avoid.

our solution is to use a technique Bernard Mortissier invented: basically you put floats on the chain every app.10 to 20m and let the chain fly over the coral. works a treat!

so after all this navigating and anchoring we looked around and found ourselves in paradise. the water crystal clear and turquoise, palm trees ahead of us and the water so still, we felt like the boat was on the hard again. in fact the first night i woke up thinking i must have dreamed all the last months as we still appear to be on land in turkey.

we spent the next days snorkeling and seeing the most amazing colourful fish and coral, hunting down coconuts and staring at this landscape around us.

after 4 nights we moved up to the little village of kauehi and attended a wonderful sunday church service held in the local language. but why we went there was not to hear the priest do his sermon, the whole of french polynesia is known for their extremely beautiful singing especially in church... and it was just amazing how the whole village joined in to sing in wonderful harmonies.

kauehi has about 150 people living on its island, a little airstrip and a school, one little shop and lots of happy children running around.

we met James and Cook - who sold me some pearls and took us out to a little pearl farm and then joined in with the village party that was waiting for the supply ship bringing all sorts of goodies, including fruit and vegetable. people gathered at the little jetty and had cake and coconut milk catching up on gossip... we simply had a great time

we then moved on to fakarava, another atoll and went through the south pass with 4kn of current against us. same navigation through coral, a different paradise. here we had black tip reef sharks swimming around our boat almost constantly... not too inviting for a snorkel, fascinating never the less.

the drift snorkel through the pass is probably one of the best snorkels i have ever done (apart from playing with the seals in galapagos) and here we saw over 100 grey sharks, white tip reef sharks and some of them getting a bit too curious to stay in the water for my liking. the amount of fish is just mind boggling. with the water so clear it is not a problem to see down to 20m of depth.

we moved up to fakarava village in the north, spend a few days there riding our bikes along the atoll and enjoying the tuamotu-lifestyle.

after 3 days we left fakarava through the north pass which is really wide and therefore not that prone to big currents. as we were told. but never believe other sailors! we went out at the height of the outgoing current with 20kn of wind behind us. we expected to be shot out from the atoll with max.4kn of current and smooth seas. we got 10kn of current, standing waves and dolphins surfing these waves. the water simply disappeared under our hull and with loud slamming we made it out...is was a bit of a gut-wrencher though!

we sailed up to Toau where we picked up a mooring buoy in a dead pass - so really well protected but on the outside of the reef and visited Valentine and Gaston who live on that atoll with their family of 8 and 5 dogs, 5 pigs and chooks.

we had a snorkel even better than fakarava south on the outside of the reef with hugh napoleon wrasses, eagle rays, turtles amazingly colorful fish and of course, sharks in crystal clear waters....we played with the dogs catching up on our lack of "puppy love" and eating a wonderful dinner Valentine prepared for us with parrot fish, big clams, lobsters, coconutbread....simply great.

Mark got offered a job to open coconuts for a year to help on the copra-planataion....very tempting! - we are still contemplating!

but all great dreams come to an end...and ours had to too. we sailed with amazing speed to Papeete, Tahiti doing those 220nm in less then 30h thanks to the 25-30kn of wind.

here we are now in the middle of a buzzing town, still finding the sand of the tuamotus in the cabin and imagining the traffic noise to be the wind in the coconut palms.

just the tuamotus alone would have been worth to cross two oceans....and i promised myself: i will go back! after all, heaven is in the lee of the reefs!