Faka Rava: The Mecca of Sea Life

It had been a pleasant short sail from Kauehi. The winds were a bit light, but that we were used to and the sun shone brightly on the spectacular blue water as we made way for the north pass on Faka Rava, about twenty five nautical miles west by northwest. We managed the timing on the pass alright, coming in about an hour after slack tide; the current was outgoing but not more than a couple of knots and the waves were choppy but fairly small. Dana was at the helm and turned the engine on as we entered; we were under full sail, but the breeze was somewhat light and I wanted to get through quickly, so I motioned to Dana to give her some throttle. The engine revved up as it normally would, but it sounded a bit strange as it slipped into gear. One becomes highly sensitized to changes in sounds on a sailboat; Ardea makes all sorts of noises and I and my crew are intimately familiar with her tunes, so when something new enters our ears, it is generally met with a good deal of suspicion.

The engine worked fine for a few minutes as we made our way toward the lagoon, but soon Dana recognized that when he increased the throttle the clutch was slipping and the engine would rev high without driving the prop. To his credit, I initially thought that the clutch was engaging given our headway and attributed the revving to the current acting on the prop and the now quite rolling motion from the chop in the pass. It soon became clear, though, that the transmission was failing to engage with increasing regularity.

Naturally, entering the pass at an atoll is not an ideal time to lose the engine, but then there really is no good time for such a thing to occur. Fortunately for us, the wind was decent enough and we proceeded to sail up the narrow channel toward the village of Rotoava while I got out the wrenches and the engine workshop manual and went about trying to determine the problem. After a while consulting the various resources on board related to our mechanical systems, I reasoned that the most likely explanation was a seizing oil pressure release valve. If said valve was too encumbered with debris, it could stick open which would cause the clutch to fail to engage. I had checked the engine oil when the problem first arose and it had more or less drained to the port side of the engine since we had been so heeled over; after we flattened out in the lagoon a bit, the oil level began to rise again on the starboard side (where the dipstick is). Supposedly the engine is designed to run at up to thirty degrees of heel, a level I had not thought we'd breached, but I was hoping that as we approached and the oil settled back down, the transmission might start behaving. Nevertheless, it could not be relied upon and I set about making a plan to anchor under sail amid rampant coral and about ten other boats.

We dropped the main sail about a hundred yards from where I planned to drop the hook and continued in under jib and mizzen. A dive boat with a half dozen customers on board followed slowly behind us, probably wondering what the hell we thought we were doing. Some of the cruisers anchored nearby stood watching in their cockpits; it's not often someone pulls this kind of maneuver in the small coral-laden anchorages of the Tuamotus. It went swimmingly, though. I tacked the boat just upwind of where the anchor needed to drop so that we would be facing back toward the channel if we needed to bail. Shortly after, Dana furled in the headsail, I blew the sheet on the mizzen and Taylor dropped the hook. Later that day I tried the engine and the transmission seemed to engage better, so I went ahead and let myself enjoy the town and the couple of cruiser-friends already arrived for the next few days.

The (only) road in Rotoava.

As regular readers might suspect, we soon made friends with some locals who were kind enough to share some of their fruit with us. The process of agriculture is very different there than it had been in the Marquesas, where fruit is in ridiculous abundance. As we wandered through the acre or two plantation of our friend, Adrian, we saw how it was done. They first dug long pits in the ground, which was composed of sand and innumerable fragments of coral from pebble-size to several inches long. Then they filled these swaths with loads of composting vegetable matter. Over a period of many years (Adrian's grandfather had begun these most productive plots in Rotoava about thirty years ago) they gained enough nutrients and soil structure to support bananas, papaya, pomplemousse, eggplant, beans and a few other crops. Needless to say, the harvest is more highly regarded here than in the Marquesas and locals inquired as we walked back to the dinghy as to where we'd gotten all that fruit.

A lemon shark cruises by.

We passed a few days enjoying access to a store and the company of friends old and new. We played soccer on the town pitch one night, which was quite enjoyable other than having difficulty adjusting to the rule that goals can be scored by header only. Taylor had mentioned to one of the locals that he had a surfboard he was willing to trade, and this generated quite a bit of interest. Eventually he traded the board and I a spare inverter for a number of local black pearls. We couldn't help but remark that this was the ideal situation as both parties left from barter feeling as though they had received the superior bargain. After we traded we played basketball with some locals until well after dark. Though we had once again found ourselves in a comfortable routine that we likely could have carried on for some time, we knew we needed to get a move on if we wanted to see the famed south pass of Faka Rava.

Soccer in Rotoava.

The trip to the south pass was about 30 nm, though we ended up stopping about halfway to anchor for the night because the damn transmission had started acting up again. We ended up in quite a beautiful spot though and totally isolated, which is a good feeling after more crowded anchorages.

At anchor in Tranny Bay, halfway to the south pass.

The following morning we began work on the engine. I had decided it was too risky to dismantle the oil pressure valve on the transmission because there was an old clip ring that I didn't think I could remove without destroying; at that time, we were in possibly one of the worst places to be stuck in need of parts. It was all the better though, as, before long, I had managed to finally track down the nut on the transmission that gives access to the oil pan. It may well have been that the valve was stuck open, but the cause, rather than debris, was simply a lack of fluids (the transmission oil is separate from the engine oil). Other than cursing the now notoriously bad access to the port side of the engine in Ardea, which had made the process of finding and fixing the problem much more difficult than it needed to be, I was happy that it ended up being a simple issue that was instantly corrected with the addition of some oil to the gearbox. In high spirits and inspired by the comical name-giving from the old European navigators, we decided to name our mid-way anchorage Tranny Bay, for having fixed our transmission problems there.

Dana and Nick enjoying a beer at the small pension after
a dive at the south pass.

We pulled the hook and carried on the rest of the way to the south pass where we anchored next to Saltbreaker, who we hadn't seen since Hiva Oa. We promptly began to enjoy again some of that good old jerry-jug rum and caught up with Nick, who was alone on Saltbreaker until his brother returned from a hiatus to the States. It wasn't until the following morning that we indulged in the diving that gave this place its reputation. We drove the dink to the outside of the pass on an incoming tide and hopped in the water. The views were absolutely magnificent. The fish were stunning in variety and abundance. Our favorites, after what became at least four pass dives we did during our stay, were the Napolean fish and the unicorn fish. Perhaps more awesome than those hilarious looking creatures were the dozens of sharks swimming all around. There was a mix of black-tip, white-tip and gray reef sharks, all of which are rather timid, but it was still amazing to be in and among them as they would swim around us with as much curiosity as we payed them. We were totally mesmerized by the coral landscapes and the incredible abundance of life in and around the pass. I'll some underwater photos later on.

An ecosystem develops beneath the boat due to the bits of food
and waste that we send overboard.

We stayed already a few days longer than we had planned (pretty much standard) and we may have stayed more but for a high pressure system approaching from the southwest that was going to bring a strong northerly through, making our current anchorage untenable. The decision to be made was whether to change anchorages and wait out the system for another three days or so, or put to sea and enjoy the system en route to Tahiti. I chose the latter.

Sunset in Faka Rava. Note the random coral outcrop-
these are what make the atolls so damn tricky.

It took about an hour to get the anchor up as it was terribly wrapped around coral heads. I watched the reef sharks swimming around the boat curiously just before I jumped in the water with mask and fins to observe the chain and direct Dana at the helm and Taylor at the bow in an effort to get it off of the worst of the tie-ups. In spite of a squall that blew through during the anchor extravaganza, we got loose and put out through the pass. The swell was large and the wind blew east by southeast nearing twenty knots as we broke through the current and set a course west flying only the jib. It was only a 240 nm passage and we were leaving the land of scary navigation, so, in spite of the mixed and uncomfortable swell, we sat back expecting a hasty and simple crossing. The sun set spilling orange and pink over the outcrops of palms that seemed to branch suddenly from the sea as the atoll fell behind the horizon. I looked on with a bit of apprehension- this was the first time we had put out to sea knowing the forecast was a bit nasty. But then I thought to myself: Tahiti.

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.