20 September - Heading West

0600 position 16-48S 150-52W. 7 miles south east of Farerea Pass, Huahine

The midnight to 6AM watch is when I feel like writing. When we are not at
sea, I'm not on watch so the blogs don't get written. But here we are
sliding along on our way to Huahine and I'm on watch in the wee hours
again. Lori is sound asleep in her cabin, auto is driving, and I've just
made my first cup of coffee. We are on a beam reach in about six knots of
wind heading north west. The passage from Moorea to Huahine is usually a
run, but the high pressure area passing to our south has brought the wind
around to the north east. Good thing too. Running in this light air
would be miserable. We'd be slatting and slow. The sea is as flat as it
is coming home from the sandbar. If the moon was up it would be perfect.

We departed Moorea just before sunset after a dinner of grilled lamb,
eggplant, and baguette. It is seventy five miles to Huahine, just
slightly more than we can comfortably do in daylight hours so we are
making an overnight trip of it. It's the only way we can be sure to
arrive with plenty of light to enter Huahine's lagoon.

Lori and I had a great time in Moorea. We discovered areas that we hadn't
seen before including the anchorage off of the abandoned Club Med resort
on the west end of the island. It was accessible through the Taotai Pass,
and we found a nice place to drop the hook between the mainland and two
small motus. That end of Moorea has lots of active resorts so we had to
put up with jet skis and speeding tour boats, but we had a good time
snorkeling with sharks, turtles, and rays between the motus and enjoyed
lunch at a restaurant on one of them.

We also discovered that we could hike to the top of "Magic Mountain" above
Papetoai Village when we saw folks standing on top of it from the boat.
It looked like a great place to view Oponohu Bay and the fringing reef, so
we asked at the Post Office in Papetoai and they told us how to get there.
Hiking to the lookout was great exercise for our out of shape legs and we
got some great pictures.