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.