Getting Comfortable

​ 0800 Position 16-49S 150-59W.  Anchored in Avea Bay, Huahine

 

We are waiting in Huahine for a weather window to head southeast back to Tahiti.  It is a little over 100 miles away, directly into the prevailing southeasterly trade winds.  Fortunately, the trade winds in the South Pacific are not as steady and reliable as those in Hawaii.  Every week or so during the winter months here a weather system passing to the south causes the wind to swing into the western quadrant for a little while giving boats the opportunity to sprint east.  Sometimes it lasts for just a few hours, sometimes days.  In 2014 we jumped on a passing westerly in Tonga and stayed with it for eleven days and 1,500 miles to get east to French Polynesia, unusual but not unheard of.

 

We need to sail to Tahiti to pick up a couple of crew members who are flying in, do some shopping, and clear out of the country with customs and immigration.

 

Avea Bay is a great place to hang out waiting for a wind shift.  The Relais Mahana has a dinghy dock100 yards from where we are anchored that they invite visiting cruising boats like us to use.  It is convenient for us, and all the other boats' dinghies pass right by Van Diemen to use the dock.  We've made friends with a couple of cruisers passing by, and there is always entertainment with tourists from the hotel on SUPs and kayaks.  The hotel has ice for sale, we love the food truck across the street, and there is a store that sells fresh baguettes about a half mile away.  We have free WIFI from the hotel, the water is clear and warm for swimming or snorkeling…  What's not to like?

 

We have been watching the weather closely for the past few days, and it looks like our next window for sprinting east won't come until this Tuesday.  That's unfortunate.  We need to be in Tahiti by Sunday night to pick up our first arriving crew member so it looks like we may have to tough it out and sail to windward to get there.

​

Pursuing Bandwidth

0800 Position 16-49S 150-59W.  Anchored in Avea Bay, Huahine

 

Yesterday was a lazy day spent recovering from the 4^th of July festivities.  Rob and Renee went for a short bike ride.  I only left the boat to go for a twenty minute swim and Mike went ashore once to pick up ice for our rum drinks from the hotel bar.  It rained off and on all day so wasn't a good day for adventuring anyway.

 

This morning at 4AM I got up to relieve myself, walked to the stern of Van Diemen, looked down, and saw a number of sea cucumbers on the sand in the moonlight directly below me.  We have very good visibility in the water here, but not good enough to see the bottom clearly in thirty feet of water where we dropped the anchor.  I woke up Rob who came aft with a weight on the end of a line.  He measured the water depth.  Six feet.

 

The wind had shifted to the north during the night swinging us around back to where our French pals on the catamaran had anchored on the sloping sand bank.  Our desire to get an optimized WIFI signal from the Relais Mahana had put us a little too close to the sand for adequate swinging room.

 

No big deal.  Sand bottom, smooth water, and we hadn't touched, yet, but we were too close for comfort so we reanchored a little further from the sand bank.  Now we have good swinging room but the WIFI signal sucks…

A nasty looking squall rolls into Avea Bay
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The Tour de Huahine

0800 Position 16-49S 150-59W.  Anchored in Avea Bay, Huahine

 

There is a little known bicycle race that was held yesterday on the island of Huahine Iti.  The Tour de Huahine, held in conjunction with the Tour de France now underway in Europe and celebrating Independence Day in the United States, is a relay race twice around the island.  This year's entries, Team Relais, made up of Rob and Noodle, and Team Mahana, made up of Rene and Mike, were closely matched in the competition.  It was a classic battle of age and experience versus youth and beauty.  The first pairing, Rob and Renee, started at 830AM.  Other than a few rain squalls their lap around the nine square mile island of Huahine Iti was uneventful.  They were neck and neck as they entered the transition area at 1130AM.  The handoff was a thing of beauty.  Rob called Van Diemen on the hand held VHF and the second pair dinghied in to take custody of the bicycles.  It's a long way to Tefarerii, the halfway point in the course, and it was tough going past that point.  Mike and Noodle didn't get rained on, but the headwinds after Tefarerii consumed what little gas was left in the tank and they agreed to stop at a store a mile from the finish and reenergize with a beer.  The rest of the race was close and there was no clear winner except the Hinano Brewing Company.  With the competition concluded at 3PM, the teams repaired to Van Diemen to nurse sore okoles and tired muscles with more Hinano.

 

We had a post race 4^th of July dinner party aboard Van Diemen last night inviting over a cruising family from Newport Beach who are here in Avea Bay on their Pacific Seacraft 38, Sweet Pea.  Kevin, Brit, and son Evan Fullerton are crossing the Pacific as a part of the Pacific Puddle Jump fleet headed for New Zealand.  We had a great time comparing our cruises.  Their passage from Newport to the Marquesas took twice as long as ours did.  This is their first ocean crossing and the program is a bit less sophisticated than ours.  They only just lit their stove for the first time two months into the voyage after Brit flew down to join the boys in Tahiti.  Up to that point everything they ate or drank was cold.  That is really roughing it, but they are having the time of their lives.

Noodle tries on the "yellow beanie" that is traditionally worn by the winner of the Tour de Huahine

​Van Diemen proudly flying the Stars and Stripes on the 4th of July​

Independence Day

0800 Position 16-49S 150-59W.  Anchored in Avea Bay, Huahine

Our nightly routine includes hoisting the dinghy alongside Van Diemen for security.  We spent all day aboard yesterday and didn't even launch the dinghy.  That's a first for this cruise.  We were all busy working on projects.  Rob and Renee built an awning for the foredeck and Mike cleaned and oiled some of the teak gratings below.  With good internet access on the boat for the first time, I updated the blog to include pictures with the posts for the past two weeks.  Mike went for a quick swim, but otherwise nobody left the boat.

There is quite a bit of daily vessel movement here in Avea Bay.  The charter boaters have a lot to see during their short visits so they rarely stay in the same spot for more than a night.  Our French entertainment was replaced by an English speaking family on a catamaran that anchored a reasonable distance away.  Somebody on the new catamaran plays the saxophone, and we could hear it well into the evening.  The player was pretty good, but that kind of music seems out of place here.

If you squeeze a grape you get grape juice.  Let the juice sit around long enough and it will probably ferment and become wine.  Over an extended period the wine will turn into vinegar.  What does vinegar degrade into?  Isn't vinegar the end of the line?  Why then, is there a bottle of vinegar aboard Van Diemen that says "best before 9/6/2020?  That's more than three years from now.  What happens on 9/7/2020?  We have discussed this topic at length without resolution.

Avea Bay

Relais Mahana Resort

The Pink Panther

0800 Position 16-49S 150-59W.  Anchored in Avea Bay, Huahine

The cooling water temperature sensor shut down Van Diemen's generator automatically just before we left Bora Bora, and yesterday Rob dug into it to figure out why.  Overheating is usually caused by inadequate flow, so Rob first took apart the water pump.  He found two of the ten flexible rubber pump impeller vanes broken, and the rest cracked, so he removed the vane pieces from the heat exchanger and replaced the impeller.  That was one problem corrected, but water flow was still less than normal and the generator was still overheating.  He cleaned the strainer, but water flow was still less than normal through the intake.  A stiff wire run down through the intake and out of the through hull didn't solve the problem.  What the heck?  I dove over the side to check it out from the outside while Rob probed from the inside.  While I was underwater a 7/8 inch diameter hard transparent sphere came out of the through hull.  It looked like an eyeball.  I don't know if it was an animal or a plant, but it wasn't man made.  It was large enough to get into the 1 inch diameter through hull pipe, but not large enough to pass into the ¾ inch diameter strainer intake.  It was just moving down and out of the way during Rob's previous probings.  Problem solved in a mere three hours.

Just before noon two charter catamarans with French crews powered into the bay.  We could tell they were French because the guys were wearing banana hammocks.  True to form, with the entire Pacific Ocean to anchor in, the first catamaran decided to anchor about seventy five feet dead to windward of us, and his buddy in the second catamaran anchored next to him.

I've had two previous experiences in Avea Bay with French idiots anchoring too close.  The first time I confronted the skipper of the other boat who replied, "Monsieur, I am not concerned."  I moved rather than risk the boats swinging together.  The second time a French catamaran anchored too close directly to windward of us, and their anchor dragged.  I had to tie my own anchor line to a buoy and let it go to avoid being hit by the dragging vessel.  Lori powered Moku pe'a around the anchorage while I swam over and reanchored the catamaran who's crew was ashore at the time.  Here we go again.

During the afternoon the Van Diemen crew decided to go for a drift dive around the southern end of Huahine.  I used the opportunity to get some exercise.  We motored the dinghy south in the lagoon to where the coral was nice.  Mike got in with his fins and mask and I just had goggles on.  It took about a half hour to swim the half mile back to Van Diemen.  Great exercise, and it made that first beer of the afternoon taste fantastic.  As we swam by our buddies on the French catamaran we noticed that their anchor was sitting on a steep slope between the six foot depth over the sand bar and the thirty foot depth of the anchorage.  Their anchor was poorly set and would almost certainly drag if the wind came up.

We got word that there was a pretty good food truck opened daily across the street from the Relais Mahana and went there for dinner.  They had a "3 Cheese Pizza" on the menu, and that's what I ordered.  The proprietor arrived at our table with three cheese pizzas for me.  The place was busy and she was able to sell the two extra pizzas to other customers.  The food was great though, and reasonably priced.

At 130AM this morning the inevitable happened, and Inspector Clouseau's anchor dragged out into deep water when the wind increased.  The wind had also shifted a bit, fortunately, and they didn't hit us as they dragged by but it was close.  It was chaos aboard the French boat as they tried to figure out what was going on and reanchor.  At first it looked like they were going to try to anchor right on top of us again.  Shining our spotlights at them didn't get their attention, but Rob yelling "Go anchor somewhere else!" did.  It took them a couple of hours to get properly anchored and this morning they were 100 yards away.  

Gentlemen Don’t Sail to Windward

0800 Position 16-49S 150-59W.  Anchored in Avea Bay, Huahine

We got an early start in anticipation of a long day sail ahead of us, and powered out of Bora's lagoon at 830AM.  The double reefed mainsail went up in the calm waters of the lagoon.  We set the full jib when we turned the corner at the lighthouse on the south western tip of Bora's barrier reef and shut off the engine when we got out of the lee of the island.  It was blowing in the low teens, right on the beam.  Perfect. 

Tahaa and Raiatea lie between Bora and Huahine and prevented us from heading directly toward our destination.  Our course took us due east until we passed to the north of Tahaa's barrier reef and then south east to Huahine.  After we got settled on course we noticed a sail directly in front of us headed in the same direction.  The AIS indicated it was an Oyster 65 named Meteorite, two miles ahead.  They were taking advantage of the favorable wind to get from Bora to Huahine, just like us….  Race on!

Oyster is the sailboat equivalent of Rolls Royce.  These English built fiberglass cruising sailboats are sleek, quick, and expensive.  Meteorite is a new model 655.  We figure the 655 goes for about $3M.

After about half an hour we could see that we were reeling Meteorite in.  They could see it too and started messing with their sails.  First they set a larger jib and then reefed their mainsail.  It didn't matter, we kept gaining on them.  We caught them just after rounding the northern edge of Tahaa and by the time we arrived at Huahine were nearly two miles ahead of them.  The owner must be humiliated after being beaten so soundly by a smaller, older, wooden boat.  I hope they had him on a suicide watch last night.

Van Diemen arrived in Fare, Huahine's main town, at 130PM having averaged nearly ten knots for the passage.  We doused our sails and powered eight miles inside the reef to Avea Bay at the southern end of Huahine's western lagoon where we anchored off of the Relais Mahana Resort.

The Relais Mahana is our favorite Resort in all of French Polynesia because it has a strong WIFI signal and we have the password.  The crew figured this out when Van Diemen anchored here on their first pass through the area while I was in Hawaii.

A rum drink at sunset, barbequed lamb chops for dinner, and movie in the saloon afterwards made for a pleasant end to a great day.

The Front

0800 Position 16-30S 151-45W. Anchored off of Vaitape, Bora Bora

Yesterday morning Mike and Renee took the dinghy around the corner to Vaitape to do some provisioning and returned a couple of hours later with a boat load of food. After it was all put away we slipped our mooring and powered south to do some snorkeling at the south end of Toopua. On the way we paused off of Vaitape to hit a fruit stand since the shore crew hadn't found the fresh fruit they were looking for on their first expedition. Mike and Renee took the dinghy in while Rob and I drifted off shore on Van Diemen. Mike took the opportunity to purchase a bag of ice. Our evening rum drinks are civilized again.

There is a great snorkeling spot at the south end of Toopua where the water that comes over the barrier reef as surf flows into the lagoon. We anchored in twenty feet of water on a sand bar close by and swam over. There are normally a couple of commercial boats here full of tourists but we had it all to ourselves. As a result we were mobbed by the fish there that are used to being fed by the divers. There were thousands of disappointed fish (we didn't feed them) around us and I got some great GoPro video.

We have been watching a low pressure system approaching the Society Islands for about a week now. Our grib files showed it passing just south of us today bringing the wind out of the west for about twelve hours. This would be perfect opportunity to head east back to Huahine, so that is our plan.

Unfortunately, gribs do not do a good job predicting the winds in the area of fronts, and apparently there was a front associated with this low pressure system. We anchored in the bay off of Vaitape late yesterday afternoon in anticipation of strong northerly winds last night. The gribs didn't show a front though and true to form didn't predict winds as strong as we saw overnight. It blew over thirty knots in the gusts as the front passed at midnight, but our anchor held and we were fine.

This morning the wind is back down in the low teens and blowing from just west of north, perfect for today's sixty mile dash over to Huahine.