A Pile of Faces.

We set the hook at the southeast corner of Kauehi (Cow-Ay) far from the small village on the opposite end of the atoll seeking a little bit of pristine solitude. That we got. Anchored in 15 feet of crystal clear water with nothing but a fresh breeze blowing across palm laden motus and over calm water, we stared for a while in disbelief. Then we donned snorkel and fins and plunged into the salty jacuzzi.

Inside the pass at Kauehi.

Though I continue in my old age to swim with a shameless pleasure that has accompanied me into the water since childhood, on this trip I've noticed a small change in perception as I splash about joyously. Gliding through the shallows, I enjoyed the simple serenity of being enveloped in the sea and I gazed closely at all the wonders of the underwater world; admittedly, though, as I snorkeled past beautiful coral heads and watched myriad fish of all shapes and colors, I brought with me a predatory notion. It can't be helped, really, for we live in an isolation that demands self-sufficiency. Of course, we could eat rice and beans for a long time and survive, but to add variety and substance to our meals requires a bit of foraging and predation. In the Tuamotus, though, there is little in the way of fruit; the coconuts on shore near our anchorage were harvested by locals who export copra. Furthermore, the vexing presence of poisonous ciguatera and the lack at that moment of a local of whom to ask for guidance on fish consumption meant we were pretty short on options. Pelagic fish- tuna in particular- do make it into these lagoons and would represent the top prize in the atolls, but as I careened carelessly through the beautiful water, I had in my mind's eye something slower, something spineless.

I cruised through the watery world staring wide-eyed at mountains of yellow-green brain coral specked with the colorful plumes of christmas-tree worms, craggy heads of pink, purple and orange branching corals housing infinitely complex societies of colonial ascidians, cowries, poisonous cone snails and other gastropods, bryozoans, small crabs and shrimp, octopi, limpets and chitons, Tridacna clams large and small of technicolor ti-dye, Diadema urchins with long, black, sinister spines, heart urchins, and sea-slugs two feet long... the marine invertebrates have been the center of my ecological fascination perhaps since the day an unsympathetic bivalve clamped down on my six-year-old toe in Chautauqua Lake. But on that day in Kauehi, aside from enjoying the spectacular views of those magnificent communities, I was on the hunt. I perused away from Ardea with spiny lobster on my mind; alas they were hidden in the depths during the day and I couldn't find any under the countless coral outcrops. It wasn't until I was meandering back to the boat that I noted the abundance of one potentially delicious invertebrate on the sandy bottom. These were the fighting conch, shells eight to ten inches in length with long, blunt spines branching to one side. With ease, moving no more than a hundred feet from the boat, we collected a dozen of the largest specimens and dropped them back to the sea floor directly beneath our swim ladder (a live-well need not walls when snails be your prey). As was their evolutionary course, they made up for their ease of capture by their most stubborn resistance to extraction from their ornate calcium carbonate homes.

Conch retrieval.

We consulted the Bible (The Cruiser's Handbook of Fishing, Scott and Wendy Bannerot): they discussed only the meatier queen conch, for which there was a simple method of extraction by way of breaking one of the whorls and cutting the adductor muscle, which is the very strong muscle that allows bivalves, like clams and mussels, to shut and univalves, like conch, to recede into the protection of their shell, the only exposed portion of the body being the hard, shell-like operculum. Unfortunately, on our fighting conch, the adductor muscle was not located in such a convenient place, so we were disposed to improvise. Our method, though effective with a little practice, was not quite so elegant.

One simply places the conch to be harvested on a hard surface, say a teflon cutting board in the cockpit of one's sailboat. Then, one retrieves from one's tool box the largest and heaviest bludgeoning device, say a good old-fashioned hammer. With the conch oriented in no particular way, one then begins to pound at the shell with reckless abandon. If one wishes to be fancy, one can wear some sort of eye protection to defend against the bits of calcium carbonate shrapnel that manage, instead of being driven into the cutting board or nearby teak, to fly all over said cockpit. Of course, the crew of Ardea prefers the old fashioned method of averting the eyes entirely sometime between hammer acceleration and hammer impact. This may not seem like a controlled, precision maneuver, but that's only because it's not one at all. Like I said before: reckless abandon.

Extraction.

Some shells could be breached in three or four hardy blows, others took a dozen. Nevertheless, we were extracting a conch every couple of minutes once we got the hang of it. Cleaning the biotic portion of the beast is simple, if brutal. The viscera are readily apparent if they need to be removed, though usually they're sheared by shrapnel and hammer before one has even picked up the fillet knife. Then there is simply to hold the fellow by his operculum and trim the edges of the foot and mantle muscle. Finally, one cannot avoid the step of cutting off the poor bastard's face. You know the cute little eyes out on long stalks with this funny but endearing proboscis sticking out? Right. Just place the knife at the base of that and slice. Then voila: you've got a pile of viscera, a pile of edible meat and a pile of faces. I think we systematically murdered about nine conch for dinner that night, fried them after breading and ate them with fresh lime. It was fantastic.

Tuerto on the beach in Kauehi.

The rest of our stay at Kauehi consisted of swimming, tide-pooling a bit on the fore-reef and a half-glorious atoll kite-boarding session. I say half-glorious because Chittick was the guinea pig for a breeze that was borderline even for our big kites. He left and began an hours long process of crashing his kite and re-launching as he slowly drifted to the more sheltered portion of the atoll. Seeing this, I went back to the boat and waited for about an hour before the wind filled a bit and I managed to have a pretty good time on the warmest, flattest water ever graced with 15 knots of pressure. We left feeling strongly that the Tuamotus are of the most wonderful places in the world; we're incredibly lucky to have been able to explore them on a sailboat, navigational challenges notwithstanding, as they're almost totally inaccessible otherwise. As if to spite this positivity, we were soon to be thrown a few curve balls in the midst of the aforementioned navigational difficulties.

Rainbow over the reef.

Motu!

Onward Sentimentally

A tiki in Taiohae.

Taiohae, our first stop in Nuku Hiva, was the busiest port in the Marquesas. We had become quite accustomed to a realm of small-boat cruisers and the local inhabitants of sparsely populated islands. This new place attracted veritable yachts complete with crew to stand around at the quay waiting to be told to drive back to the mother-ship in a tender worth more than my sailboat. I recall lounging around Ardea's cockpit with our friends from La Luz as the sun set and the gargantuan mast of an eighty-foot sloop was lit up with LEDs over its entire length; laughing, Doug and I confided that we kept our masthead anchor lights unlit if we could avoid it to save electricity. La Luz is only 26 feet long, Ardea 31; we regularly make up the smallest vessels at our anchorages. But here in Taiohae, as if to tickle us with even more juxtaposition, there was a 21 foot sloop, Emma, that had carried a German singlehander all the way from the northeast Atlantic.

We were set among forty or fifty other cruising sailboats with just about everything represented, from Emma to cruise liners. The town reflected in its differences with other places we'd seen the effects of the regular influx of outsiders and money. The degree to which we'd adopted the island life was evidenced by our attitude toward all of the commotion. I sat at one point awaiting a crepe at the eatery on the quay when boatloads of tourists poured out of launches from a massive Japanese cruise ship anchored in the huge harbor; they milled about loudly and indiscreetly took many pictures of strangers and, well, everything, dressed, in spite of the heat, in the hippest of outfits (I started sweating just watching one guy with tall black leather boots and jeans). I had to remind myself that I too was an outsider as I observed with a quiet contempt that only really the locals could be justified in, though most don't bother with that sort of negativity. I recalled the words of our friend Steve from s/v August Pearl way back in La Paz: Tourists have more money than time; travelers have more time than money. It made me feel at ease- I had checked my bank account balance recently and I was damned sure I was a traveler.

Nevertheless, the experience of Taiohae brought us the opportunity to reflect on the uniqueness of our experiences in Mexico and the Marquesas. On a small, modest boat, beckoned onward by only weather and whim, we have been able to absorb the places we've visited. We have made friends and shared some of our most enriching experiences with the people we've met. Through the Marquesas, we sauntered or we carried onward, always feeling sentimental as we hauled anchor and set sail once more. We're inherently a part of this community of sailors and, being that we're relatively young and outgoing enough, we seem to have a particular penchant for assimilation with the locals wherever we've gone. In short, it's been a hell of a way to explore new places: on a little sailboat with some friends. Maybe at times we wish Ardea was ten or twenty feet longer with a watermaker and a huge freezer, but, the truth is, the yachtsman has a different experience than the sailor. We're lucky to be able to move at our own pace, unconstrained like the typical vacationer. And we've grown to appreciate the life of the sailor for all the unparalleled challenges and rewards it brings to wandering souls.

Ardea in Hakatea Bay.

We lounged with our fellow cruisers in Taiohae for about five days. As they started to head southwest for the Tuamotus, we slowly mustered the motivation to leave the Marquesas in our wake; a sadness undoubtedly enshrined the occasion. We had one more stop, though. The next bay to the West, Hakatea (known to many cruisers as Daniel's Bay), was said to be quiet and pristine. Still no swimming, as there was an aggressive tiger shark known to inhabit those waters, but there was a path that led to a nine-hundred foot waterfall, which had achieved impressive superlatives among our cruising friends. We learn much of places we plan to visit by word of mouth from other sailors that made it ahead of us; before long, we developed a running joke about the descriptions that accompany various sites and spectacles. It began with legitimate, if unverified, claims: “The third largest waterfall in the world!” Then it digressed to the subjective: “The second most beautiful mountain in French Poly!” Eventually, the superlatives became dubious at best: “The sixth bumpiest road... The top ten manliest “vahine”...”

Approaching Hakatea Bay, Nuku Hiva.

Meandering toward the waterfall.

Anyway, it was up there in the rankings, so we'd heard, and a waterfall experience is rarely a bad one. So we summoned the mental strength to weigh anchor and make the brutal six mile passage to Hakatea. We stayed two days. The walk to the waterfall was magnificent. The valley was surrounded by amazing rock walls and sheer cliffs and the path that led past the few homes that lay in the valley was something out of Alice and Wonderland. Fruit trees and beautiful hibiscus, ti, tiare and other stunning tropical plants lined the road for a time before we found ourselves surrounded by these bizarre trees with adventitious and aerial roots hanging all around like mangroves, the ends of their branches topped with bright green leaves, long and pointed, looking like bromiliads or spineless cacti. We marched through a cave made by those trees and then emerged to a flatland with ferns and forbes obscuring the ground from the path's edge to the bases of the canyon walls. We saw the falls from the path- tall indeed, possibly the second or third most awe-inspiring waterfall I've seen. When we approached the base of the falls, most of the jettisoning water wasn't visible, blocked by rock formations smoothed by constant erosion. But the pool beneath was gorgeous. We were told to watch for falling rocks (a given even for the lesser waterfalls, but for whatever reason emphasized on this one), but we swam about the pool for a time anyway. The surroundings were pristine, secluded and breathing with life. It was well worth the visit.

Massive waterfall in the distance.

The pool at the falls.

We took water the next day at a tap next to a river mouth; the scene harked of that which Joseph Conrad must have been trying to describe in Heart of Darkness- it was easily the third most literary landscape we've come across. Then, after having delayed as long as I could, I pulled out the charts and began to reason a course to and through the atolls of the Tuamotus Archipelago, some five hundred nautical miles southwest. Early the next day, we bid farewell to the Marquesas, of which we have the fondest memories, and set a course of Kauehi, a smallish atoll with a relatively easy pass.

Watering in the jungle.

Now for a little brush-up on island biogeography so this “pass” business makes sense. As first reasoned by good old Charles Darwin, volcanic islands begin their lives as lava seeps and cools at the ocean floor, slowly building up toward the surface. Eventually, the shifting of tectonic plates sends the spewing lava on down the line of a nascent archipelago to create a new molten mound and leaving behind some sort of a mountain, occasionally a big one that breaches the surface to great heights. Over many many years, as terrestrial plants and animals slowly populate this land, two processes occur simultaneously that help explain the various types of islands encountered. First, rain erodes at the rock relentlessly. Second, reef-building invertebrates, namely corals, take up shop in the near-shore shallows. Eventually, a fringing reef is built at the historical base of the volcanic island. At the same time, the rock is eroded away, slowly pulling back from its historical extent. Thus, a lagoon is created in the space between the old reef and the diminishing island. Now what was a fringing reef is called a barrier reef, and corals continue to work from the barrier through the lagoon to shore. The process continues for a few million more years before all the volcanic rock is washed to the sea, leaving behind a now very robust and large barrier reef and nothing but a big lagoon in the middle. These we call atolls, many of which have enough build up of ground-up rock and coral just behind the barrier reef to be able to accommodate plants, animals and people. These sandy, coral-laden deposits are called motus (at least in Tahitian) and can occur at the barrier reef or elsewhere in the lagoon, and not just in atolls.

Often, though not always, storm surges will pick up coral rubble and rocks and batter the reef enough to break it open, creating a pass to the lagoon. These passes are our ticket to sailing in these beautiful ocean lakes, which get offshore breezes but have much calmer waters. The trick is getting through the pass safely. Timing is critical, especially if the wind is blowing and the swell is large on the ocean. The current can rip through the pass and create standing waves that make it virtually impossible to navigate through, especially since some are only 25 meters wide. Even if the tide is right for entry or exit, water spilling over the barrier reef into the lagoon has to get out through the pass, and currents of seven or eight knots are not uncommon. The fewer passes in an atoll, the stronger the current is likely to be.

The Marquesas are a younger chain and none of the islands we have visited thus far have had barrier reefs. The Societies, on the other hand, are a bit older and all have barrier reefs as well as central islands. The Tuamotus are all atolls. They pose some of the greatest navigational challenges we've had to date as a result of the currents in and among atolls, as well as the sheer number of these low-lying islands that usually become visible to us no sooner than ten miles from the reef. So I picked out a relatively simple one to start (a somewhat deep and wide pass, easy navigation once inside) and we set off for a five hundred mile passage with fine breeze (at least for the first three and a half days). We ended up having to kill an extra day in calms so we would arrive with the proper tide and the sun high in the sky (the better for seeing coral heads), but it was a productive passage as we did some badly needed cleaning and re-arranging of tools and stores, in addition to a few other small projects. We caught two bizarre fish, both in the dead of night, snake mackerel, I would later learn. We also pulled in a skipjack tuna and I ended up losing a very long battle with a huge tuna of some sort about which I am still quite bitter.

Snake mackerel migrate from the deep
 toward the surface at night to feed.

Our entry to Kauehi went smoothly. As we approached, I hailed a sloop leaving the pass for a report on the conditions and received good news in addition to the coordinates of a fine isolated anchorage and some coral heads on approach. There were three or four foot standing waves and an ingoing current of about three knots, but we had no problems getting in. As we motored toward the southeast side of the lagoon we were fairly taken aback at the place. The water was totally flat. The motus were visible nearby, but scanning from the adjacent reef toward the distant side of the atoll, the view of the palms became obscured by heat rising as they took on a mirage look before disappearing entirely, the flat lake gone to the horizon. We missed the Marquesas while on passage, but as we gazed at this most unique and removed landscape, our excitement grew. Our plans included a great deal of swimming and snorkeling and, wind-willing, we'd get out the kites and tear it up in paradise.

One of Dana's fine photographs.

Soaking it inward.

I dropped the throttle down to idle and turned forward, my left hand gripping the mizzen shroud and my right on the boom. My eyes strained, open wide with an adrenaline rush, a stoic alertness as we coasted forward on a black sea. The sea, though, was flecked with the reflections of stars, the waves just illuminated. It was ahead lay true darkness, an empty expanse capped with the silhouettes of the jagged crags that enveloped in shadows the lee side of Fatu Hiva. I went to the nav station and checked the plotter; the radar was painting the cliffs and bits in the anchorage. We were about a mile away. I could see some masthead lights and some lights ashore. Though many would have already turned their vhf off for the night, I hailed a securite warning of our approach and asking unlit boats to make themselves visible. It was disconcerting to coast from night under the intergalactic sky into the shadows of volcanic cliffs weathered sharp and steep, casting a new degree of dark.

We approached very slowly. I was ready to cut it and turn back to the safety of the sea, but the approach was deep and simple, no reefs, no rocks, so we continued in with utmost caution. I pulled the trigger on the spotlight and lit up the black rock walls. We had been told of this anchorage by a number of others, both of its magnificence and of its navigational features. Without the latter, a night approach would have been out of the question. Even then, it was highly undesirable. The radar helped- I could pick out catamarans and monohulls well before we were among the anchored boats. There were more cruisers there than I had expected. I decided to hug the starboard side, go around the fleet to buy time to find a spot; in any case, laying Ardea on the rocks is better than into somebody's floating city. Chittick was on the bow; he lit the cliffs with his flashlight and called back to me. I agreed. They were close.

A Polish guy spoke up, trying to direct us. We had heard about this singlehander, knew him by the weird flags he flew in his rigging. Evidently he had made landfall in Hiva Oa with his steering wheel cover zipped on as he steered from the bow using remote control of his autopilot. According to the lore, he drove around the anchorage for an hour trying to anchor bow and stern before finally condescending to unsheathe the old steering wheel. I'd warn about the potential for gossip had he not just then recommended that we anchor directly astern of him, where 200 feet aft there lay a sizable catamaran. Used to errors of understanding related to the abundance of languages, I thought I'd misheard. He confirmed though, right there to his stern in forty-five feet of water on a rocky bottom with a half-million dollar catamaran tickling my mizzen boom with its hokey bowsprit. I didn't have time for this. I stopped listening to him at once and went back to getting the boat put away safely. We chugged forward and to port of the Polish guy and found a good spot in 30 or so feet of water (the anchor-weighted plumb line in use here, as the depth sounder has been out of action since I asked Dana how many triple-a's it took and he said a nine-volt). We set her down though and got a good grab, though rocky. Wind funneled through this canyon; we had been warned it was strong and we soon felt forty knot gusts. But we were clear astern. If we lost our hold we'd drift slowly to the ocean's soft embrace. I pulled the kill switch on the diesel and my heart rate let up as the pistons gave their last report and I indulged in the serene and beautiful silence that follows very briefly the sound of the cut engine. There's a very calming effect with that process for me. A conditioned response, perhaps.

Hanavave Bay, Fatu Hiva.

We had dared the forty-five mile upwind passage from Tahuata though we weren't emotionally ready for it. We had 18 knots on the nose and a nasty short swell. It was uncomfortable. We hadn't gone upwind in a long time. And, Ardea doesn't like pointing; Ardea tends to get her way, so I suppose it's more accurate to say that she just doesn't point at all, no matter how nice you treat her. So we got knocked west by the current and ended up 10 miles off land when we crossed into the lee of this mystifying place. It was a lot of extra ground to cover and we didn't get the hook down until almost eight in the evening. I slept in the v-berth to the sound of the anchor chain scraping along rocks as we swung with the wicked gusts. But when we awoke and looked around us, we felt the magic of the place. Sheer walls tabling then climbing again; black rock streaked and mottled with white and brown. Different shades of green corresponding to different grades and aspects of cliff and valley. Most surreal, these massive volcanic spires- giant rounded rock shapes stacked like cairns a thousand feet tall. The Europeans had first called this place Baie des Verges, Bay of Phalli, while the Marquesans knew it as Hanavave, strong surf, both equally fitting names. The surroundings were unreal, captivating to the eye and the mind. It inspired the imagination to see these ridges and cliffs, desolate but not forlorn, and this lush green valley going for miles and miles but with only a few modest buildings and the plumes of a few cooking fires. Fatu Hiva was remote like nothing I had experienced, as raw a place as I'll ever know. Gazing at the surroundings in Hanavave it felt like witnessing geological witchcraft, yet there was a piercing tranquility- the kind that only the hands of nature can conjure.

We went to shore and set out to hike to the waterfall foretold by the cruisers who had stopped at Fatu Hiva before checking in at Hiva Oa. Still unable to divert our attention from the jaw-dropping stone features all around, we sauntered along the trail eyes agape. The waterfall was no less fantastic. The water was cool and we joyfully swam in the pool beneath the falls for hours. We clambered up the rocky cliffs and lept into the pool, mesmerized by the sound of the crashing water and the brisk stream that flowed toward the sea. The whole afternoon we passed, eating pomplemousse and swimming. It had been a long time since we'd had a swim in fresh water.

When we finally made it back to the anchorage, it was nearing dusk. Dana and I decided to try our hand with a casting rod from the dinghy. Dana putted the old Johnson over to the rocks and I threw out some casts with a little spinner on Dana's reel. After a few minutes thinking I was hooked up on a rock, I pulled in a nice red rockfish. Without taking it off the hook we sped over to a Marquesan fishing boat where we'd seen some locals sitting earlier. They saw us approach and when I pulled the fish up to show them, they immediately gave a thumbs up, ?No Ciguatera!? and, of course, the familiar ?Mange!?. Hooray for dinner. We baked it with lots of lime and it was delicious.

There was little else in Hanavave. A very small store with mainly canned goods (there was more fresh fruit growing all about than the small population could eat) sat near the small church by the quay, but otherwise it was a small village and a fruit laden valley and sheer, uninhabitable cliffs. This was no problem for us. The waterfall was enough reason to come, as was the view of the stone spires. We soaked it up as night fell and we could hear goats calling from the cliffs by the water. It was a very strange place. It's isolation was a pervasive characteristic and it was of a form unique enough to befit that isolation well. A strangely satisfying place, really, even if there was almost nothing in the way of amenities (by boat is the only way to Fatu Hiva, be it for people or supplies).

We had little time, though, for we wanted to catch our friends in Nuku Hiva before they began to trickle toward the Tuamotus. We split the next afternoon. We had a passage of 105 nautical miles to the north side of Ua Pou, an island just south of Nuku Hiva. We pulled the anchor and pointed West, leaving the bay, when we passed another cruiser who reported that the weather prediction was for calms. Weather predictions? Right. We look at those. Well, we left anyway and had 15 knots abaft the beam and a decent swell carrying us past our old friends in Tahuata and Hiva Oa. Just 10 miles northwest of Fatu Hiva, we hooked a 33 inch mahi-mahi that was the toughest fish I've fought on the trip. We put it in a fine marinade and baked it that evening. I should take this time to sing an ode to mahi-mahi, which is one of the finest fish in many regards. It is nearly ubiquitous in its distribution, including in the open sea, where hungry sailors roam dreaming of those prized pelagic pescado. It is a beautiful, strong fish and will fight with incredible ferocity given its weight; this makes the hunt sporting, which I don't feel guilty enjoying since there's a perfectly decent chance I'll lose the battle. It is a long flat fish, pragmatically shaped from the standpoint of the angler and his fillet knife, and the skin peels off the meat with ease. It can be prepared using any number of equally phenomenal methods and its light yet rich flesh is said to bring long life to those who eat it (I made that up).

Battling a little monster.

At sunrise we were nearing the anchorage. I started watch at 0400 and steered wing-on-wing to a hundred yards shy of the breakwall before I hassled the others awake. It was good to be doing it right- landing in the morning- after our little nocturnal escapade a few nights before, though, in hindsight, it had been a fitting place for the nerve and mystery of a vessel underway at night.

We anchored in Ua Pou after only twenty hours- good time for Ardea- knowing our stay there would be equally short. We went ashore and were reminded that we had finally made it to the western Marquesas. The stores were better supplied and the peopled donned more of the artifacts of outside cultures. The difference was noticeable, but not that significant. I had been up for a while by the time we got to shore and was ready to eat. We wandered around and found a market to get baguettes and snacks. Following what seems an invariable pattern, we were soon befriended by a young Marquesan, Adam, and, as would be expected, we ended up returning to the store for beers. Yes it was early, but we had done a night passage so early and late and time were all sort of trivialized anyway.

We sat by the beach sipping beers and enjoying the always cumbersome process of semi-verbal communication. I laughed as Adam, palm conformed to his forehead and face abeam with the hilarity of it, muttered to himself in French, ?I regret not studying English more in school.? We hung out for hours and so often when one was trying to describe something to the other needing more language than he had, Adam would laugh- ?Je regret...? I told him I felt the same with French, but we both agreed it was impressive what could be communicated in spite of the language barrier. I also noted that we sailors were learning some of the language, no doubt improving in our understanding at least. Speaking French is another matter.

Ua Pou

We finished our beers and bid what was now a small gathering of friends goodbye. We had noticed a basketball court right on the waterfront and were told that people would meet to play around five that evening. So we returned to the boat and relaxed for a few hours; we ate marinated mahi-mahi sandwiches on our fresh baguettes that were fantastic. We were entertained for a while by the arrival of an impossibly huge transport ship at the small quay. The subsequent frantic loading and unloading, at least when observed from a reclined position in a small boat two hundred feet away, looked like a colony of ants, never stopping for a break, always moving, always working. It was amazing how much stuff they could turn over from ship and shore. It was a little hectic though, so I let my eyes rest there in the cockpit for a while.

How could it possibly fit?

That evening we played basketball with the locals, many of whom were very athletic but almost none of whom were fundamentally sound basketball players. It was the ideal situation, for we lack talent. We're also, as we soon discovered in a full court barefoot game, sorely out of shape. We had a great time though and played through until dark before retiring to the boat. We were conflicted, but still compelled to carry on the next afternoon. Ua Pou was a wonderful place; its landscape was different, lighter colored, more sparsely vegetated, with gradually sloped plains leading to a centralized few of the familiar black cliffs and spires. One of my crew, I don't recall which, put it well in an analogy: if Fatu Hiva and the eastern Marquesas were to southern mainland Mexico, then Ua Pou would be to the hot dry desert of southern Baja California. It was beautiful and with an abundance of good people. Still though, we yearned to meet our companions lest we fall too far behind in the collective jaunt to the western Pacific.

We sailed for Nuku Hiva with a true island attitude. Though we could easily have carried more canvas on the 25 mile reach, we sailed without the mizzen for the sake of comfort knowing our velocity made good would get us there well before dark. It was an enjoyable sail, as was that from Fatu Hiva. We're residents of the tradewinds now and though the South Pacific Convergence Zone, way over by New Zealand, can send fronts through to the south, the weather is consistent, the wind is reliable and the swell is small, if a bit mixed at times.

Tough sailing out of Ua Pou.

We anchored in Taiohae Bay with dozens of other boats. It was the biggest anchorage we had been in and at the biggest town in the Marquesas. This was the stopover that attracted megayachts and massive catamarans in addition to the lowly salts. We set the hook and saw Desolina, Blackdog, Slick, Evergreen, Bombalero, Off Tempo- all these boats we knew and many we hadn't before seen. As we were settling Ardea into her new space, I looked to shore and saw a little Lapworth with yellow sail covers and no name on the back. I knew that boat. It took a second but finally I realized it was Clover, Shane's boat. We hadn't seen him since La Paz, where he had pushed off singlehanded, except for Bear, his boat kitty. Knowing he made the crossing with only sheet-to-tiller steering aside from his own hands, we were excited to catch up. Indeed we spent the next several days hanging with him and others, learning of most recent exploits and enjoying well-stocked stores and even a few reasonable eateries.

There we all were, sort of displeased with the roll in the anchorage and a little worn out by the city life (mind you, though the biggest, the town at Taiohae was still quite small), but hesitant to leave, for the Marquesas had grown dear to us. We would sort of discuss plans for the Tuamotus, but it seemed we all hadn't done any planning yet. We weren't ready. Even so, the ghastly limitations imposed by the civilized world were looming and we knew to stay would be to cut our time elsewhere short. Slowly, boats started to trickle away, for a time disappearing into the distance, but, experience tells, soon to be seen bobbing at some knew paradisaical place, a reunion all but inevitable in spite of the endless horizons of the Pacific.

[Posted via radio, so I'll add pictures when we get internet again]

Updated!

Thanks for all the well wishes of late. As you may have suspected, we celebrated the birthdays thoroughly.

I just updated the blog- it's only three islands behind us now. I promise I'm trying, though. I got some photo re-sizing software from Slick, which makes uploading pictures much much easier (hence the abundance in the latest post).

I also updated the shiptrak so you can see which islands we have visited (if you zoom way way in). I'll keep updating that as we go, but we're at anchor a lot, so those updates won't come too fast.

I hope the throes of the Northern California summer aren't as trying as this harsh southern hemisphere winter.

We're going to head for the Tuamotus soon, a five hundred mile passage (child's play). We're sort of in a rush, but you wouldn't guess it if you saw us.

Take care and thanks for the continued support!

-Connor

Mange. Mange.

Hanamoenoa. Closest to the beach again.

At Hanamoenoa Bay on Tahuata, we lounged about for two days enjoying crystal clear water above white sand dotted with bits of coral. We plunged into the water numerous times throughout the day, splashing about and drinking coconut juice; there were several other boats there and in some hilarious ways it was rather like a pool party. We might be reclined in the cockpit, enjoying the shade produced by our bedsheet bimini when suddenly fellow cruisers Steve and Drew would saunter by in the water, just putting around for the hell of it with a snorkel on, and we might chat for a while before they'd splash away again. Likewise, we passed the time gazing at sea creatures or swimming about merrily. Ashore there was a fine white sand beach, but not much else except coconuts. We collected plenty of the latter and found that, in addition to providing a refreshing beverage, coconuts are great pool toys. We invented coconut water polo, where you start in the water at opposite ends of the boat and battle to get the coconut from the middle to the other side; we also found a good deal of entertainment in diving coconuts, which are incredibly buoyant, to the sea floor and watching them race back to the surface. Needless to say, it was quite refreshing to be at an anchorage where it was safe to swim. The wisdom around here says that black sand beaches or murky water means sketchy swimming due to sharks; there's also the fact of waste from cruising sailboats to consider.

So we were happy to be there for a while, but we soon moved down to the next spot- Vaitapu Bay, also known as Resolution Bay, a name given by Captain Cook when we refitted his ship (the Resolution) there a couple hundred years ago. There we found the small town of Vaitapu, and an awesome local family.

Tahuata from the water.

We left Hanamoenoa in the evening and it only took twenty minutes or so to get to our next spot. By the time we got anchored and went to shore, the sun was just going down. We left the dinghy at the quay and walked past a line of fuel drums awaiting the next supply ship visit on the way toward the village, just a hundred or so yards in the only direction the road went. We walked past a house, then a beat-up old single-room church and were almost to the first cross road, still not five minutes from the quay, when an older Marquesian guy with shaggy hair and a long beard streaked with white called out asking if we were Americans. We confirmed his suspicion and he waved us over with a big upward swing of his arm. His name was Iona; he had a big belly and a jolly smile. He sat under a tarp awning next to a small, cheap pool table around which were several people of various ages playing or watching. The tarp kept off the rare billiards table rain and castings from the huge breadfruit and mango tress in the yard. There was a house just behind with a big open patio where there were a few more people hanging out. Before long, we were each in turn getting owned at billiards by an 11 year old named John and drinking piahana with our new friends. They were incredibly hospitable. Most everyone there was related in some way or another and by the end of the evening, Jimi, the 25 year-old nephew of Iona, invited us to his house up the hill the following day to see his plantation and harvest some fruit.

Little John running the table.

We met Jimi the following morning and he drove us up to his house with John, his brother who had beaten us a pool the night before, and Pierre, their uncle, who is 29 years old. We ate poisson cru and fried fish and Jimi joked that he ate ten fish for breakfast and ten for lunch (he was only sort of joking, though these were little reef fish). Of course, he ate his breakfast at 4 am, unlike us white boys. Thus, he mainly watched as we ate and chatted. The food was never-ending though and it was insisted that we eat until we could eat no more. No more fish on your plate? Fear not- Jimi or Pierre will load you up with some more fish and provide the encouraging instructions: “Mange. Mange.” We'd spent enough time with Marquesans by now to understand the French word for “eat”, though it was nonetheless accompanied by a hand with fingers pointing up and brought together being waved toward the mouth. So we ate as best we could.

John hanging out with the "pet" pig. We're
pretty sure being the pet means better food but
still certain death.

Bocce in the yard. Taylor vs. Jimi.

We then spent the next couple hours wandering around his land collecting fruit. He has an incredible array of fruit trees and we soon had a huge sack with papaya, pomplemousse, eggplant, oranges, limes and bananas. Jimi also raises pigs and we got a huge kick out of watching all the pigs running around.

After we had been given all that fruit, we offered to buy some beers to enjoy for the afternoon. So Jimi drove us down to the store and we bought a case of Hinano and took it back up to the house. The next several hours were spent drinking beer and playing bocce (John also beat all of us at that, though he couldn't beat Jimi). It was great talking to those folks, too. They had a little bit of English, which really helped. Jimi told us about all of his tattoos and about Marquesan culture. He tried to teach us a bit of the language, too, but we were terrible, often unable to repeat anything longer than a few syllables. We were pretty stoked to learn, though, that originally there was no Marquesan word for “thank you”. He explained that everything was shared, that whatever you had belonged to everyone, so there was no need for such a word. We thought that was pretty cool, if less practicable since the arrival of the white man and all his stuff.

Papayas and our friend Jimi.

Jimi hunting bananas in his ample plantation.

Bananas drying. Early: whole bananas (front, light color),
Mid: sliced in half after a week (back, darker), End: finished
drying (front right of table).

Though we had basically been eating continuously (there was a large table of bananas in different stages of the drying process that we were encouraged to vulture around), we eventually ate a lunch of chicken and spaghetti prepared by Jimi's wife. When I finished my first helping of spaghetti I looked up to see Pierre holding a big fistful of noodles just above the pot on the table, motioning the noodles toward my plate and saying, his own mouth full, “Mange. Mange. You eat.” Alright, fine, I thought, I'll eat some more. This went on until everything was gone. By then it was 2 or 3 in the afternoon and we were totally wiped out; we had done nothing but eat and drink all day and we could barely move. Jimi drove us back down toward the water. We had found out earlier that he was an avid spearfisherman, so we asked if he would take us out the next day. We arranged to meet in the morning at his uncle's house.

Dana carting off some of the harvest.

We sauntered over weary-eyed in the morning and found Jimi sitting on the beach with his mother waiting for us. The latter sat on a rock in front of a large pile of beautiful brown-speckled cowrie shells, the largest I had ever seen. As is so often the case, while I stared in wonder at the beauty of these tropical gastropods, the Marqeusan woman absentmindedly obliterated the creatures between rocks- evidently the foot is eaten raw or doused in coconut milk (what food can't be improved by a coconut bath?). My peculiar adoration of marine invertebrates thus stimulated, I inquired as to what other creatures were harvested from the intertidal. I learned that large limpets, also gastropods, were pried from rocks, their layers of armor compromised and their flesh also eaten raw or, naturally, with coconut milk.

Soon we gathered the necessary things for spearfishing, namely the weapons, snorkels, fins, a floating plastic tub for the harvest, and a young Marquesan lad apparently engaged by Jimi to swim around towing said plastic tub while we fished. He did this with impressive indifference; we were in the water for a couple of hours and he splashed slowly and merrily behind us, tied to the tub of dead and dying fish, issuing not a word of complaint or boredom. As for our spearmanship, the learning curve was evident. Jimi pointed out several fish that we could target without fear of ciguatera poisoning (this local knowledge is critical to the safe eating of reef fish). I myself could see one of the approved species in high numbers and thus chose to focus entirely on that- a small sergeant-major-like fish but with black and white stripes rather than black and yellow. I soon began to stray from the others as I strained to verify my abilities as a top predator species. I was using my Hawaiian sling, which is a long pole-spear with a shock chord anchored to the non-business end such that one can loop the chord between thumb and forefinger before cocking the spear back against the bungee and gripping the pole to hold it cocked. As soon as the grip on the pole is released, the spear sling-shots toward it's target, or to the space the target was at before it executed with ample time to spare its escape plan, or to the space a few feet away from the target, or directly into coral or sand. It's really quite difficult to make contact. Those fish are remarkably fast. Even as my aim started to improve, they would jet away easily before my javelin of death arrived. It was perturbing to find such difficulty in killing these fish, but then, they literally spend their entire lives thus engaged as prey, constantly vigilant, always skirting death, sneaking a nibble at some algae when able.

I wouldn't be out-witted by them, though, even if their experience was greater than mine. I began to understand the nature of the game. The miniscule brain that fits between those big beady black eyes is apparently large enough to process that when a big animal sits staring at you and your friends from the surface for a few minutes then descends directly towards you before sending some fast-moving apparatus out ahead of itself, the proper reaction is to swim away rapidly. So I wasn't exactly a ninja fish at first, but soon I learned that spearing was easy when in the right position- the game required to achieve that position was the tricky part. I began to pick my targets out from farther away as I slowly skidded across the surface; sometimes it was easier to go for fish in twenty or thirty feet of water for, since they stayed near the bottom, the long approach allowed for more of the requisite acting. Once I'd acquired a target, I would relax all my muscles for a few moments before taking a deep breath and angling toward the depths. As my fins broke the surface and followed me down, I would cock the sling then equalize the increasing pressure in my sinus. I would deliberately swim toward the fish I was targeting for a few seconds but without looking at him, then I would change course several degrees toward the opposite direction he was facing. This was the most critical step and, if executed properly, noticeably pacified the fish. With a couple of proper course changes and keeping eyes away from the prey, I could get in close without causing mass hysteria. Then I started getting hits. The first was quite successful, all three prongs of the spear's trident piercing clear through the fish's body. I swam the unfortunate bugger over to the bucket, which bobbed a bit as its tow line was tugged by the playfully flipping and flopping Marquesan boy.

I was encouraged by finally having nabbed some prey, but I soon found that I had only discovered a portion of the challenges of spearfishing. Suffice to say there were several fish left that day hiding under rocks with one, two, three, even four new holes clear through their bodies; I learned the incredible fight that remained in even a fish that had been so impaled. I witnessed the brutal nature of the reef, as the companions with whom a fish had been nibbling only moments prior would turn and begin to bite at the friend that had acquired bloody holes in his body. It is not an easy place to live, though clearly the woes of the hunter pale in comparison to the hardships of the hunted.

Jimi fixing my sling after our outing.

In the end, I contributed four or so fish to the bobbing plastic bin, Dana and Taylor each speared a few and Jimi speared the remaining dozen. We brought the bin back up to the house and set about preparing a feast with Pierre, who hadn't been able to come fishing because of a leg fracture he sustained playing soccer, Jimi's wife, little John, and whatever other family members were hanging around. I scaled fish with a piece of wood with two bottle caps nailed to the end (the best fish-scaling tool I've ever used) while Jimi and his wife cleaned them. Their method for cooking varied by species. The black and white striped type and one or two types of trigger fish went to the frying pan. The red goat-fish and small snapper-like fish were given the usual coconut bath and eaten raw. There was also black-tip reef shark, which had been caught the day before by another family member and was delicious eaten raw with coconut and lime. We were entertained to find that the traditional methods for extracting coconut milk had given way to the modern devices: the coconuts were shucked by a good run in the washing machine, then the meat was ground out of the shells using a large rounded-cylindrical bit with small barbs cut all over that was spun by a large electric motor harvested from god knows what. It was fast, though, and we enjoyed participating in the process. The resulting meal was as epic as ever, too, and we were given to mange until our bellies would hold no more. Once again, a lack of any part of the meal on one's plate meant an instant refill at the hands of Jimi and Pierre. Whole fish flopped onto the plate while you weren't looking, steamed breadfruit, boiled bananas, strings of shark meat and plenty of purple drink to wash it down. Again, we had spent the majority of the day in the harvesting, preparing and consuming of food and were, by the end, totally exhausted and sated.

We thanked the family endlessly for their kindness and walked down to the beach where the dinghy lay waiting and where loads of children were playing in the water. As we approached, Jimi's son, who had been splashing in the shallows, ran out to meet us at the dinghy, excited to help us launch. Evidently, the prospect of assisting with the white guys' dinghy was deemed exciting and soon we had seven or eight Marquesan kids lined up all around the dink. A few more came over looking dissapointed that there was no spot for them to grab on, so I pointed to the bow line and they excitedly ran over and grabbed the painter, huge smiles appearing on their faces. So I counted to three in terrible French and we all carried the dinghy to the sea. Of course, once afloat, the kids started climbing in and around the dink, so we paddled slowly until one by one they jumped off of their own volition and, always laughing, made their way back to the shallows.

Dana trying to figure out the best way to go about this.

Tahuata had proven as welcoming and wonderful as Hiva Oa, and we were once again sad to leave. But we had so many places we wanted to explore that we had to resist the urge to post up for weeks at each spot. So, the next morning, we pulled the hook and set a course South. For the first time in a while, we were sheeted close, having opted to brave the upwind beat to visit the notoriously beautiful and remote island of Fatu Hiva

Ardea posted off of Vaitapu.