The Tuamotus are traditionally called the Dangerous Islands.  This name stems from times when there was no GPS and navigation was by dead reckoning and celestial navigation only.  The Tuamotus are essentially volcanos that sank into the sea, with only the top of the rim sticking out nowadays – dangerous reefs.  The South and West sides of most of them is just barely above water, if at all.  As a result, approaching them from the South or West is very dangerous as you don’t see the reef until you are almost on it – unless you have GPS.  The North and East sides consist of reefs a little bit further out of the water (maybe 6 feet) and interspersed “motus” – little palm studded islands.   Sometimes there is no pass at all into the interior of the volcano – the lagoon.  But many of the Tuamotus have passes that are navigable at the right time.  Getting into these passes is the name of the game in cruising the Tuamotus.  It is not easy to get in or out of these passes as tidal currents often rage and there is little guidance of when is the best time to get in or out.  Once inside, however, there are often terrific anchorages of undescribeable beauty and the islands are very sparsely populated so often there are no towns or even houses in sight.  A dream destination for cruisers.   

 

We left Ua Pou in the Marquesas after a fantastic, late lunch and soon settled into our routine of 3 hour watches during the night and 4 hour watches during the day.  After a few hours of motoring the Easterly trades set in and we had a great sail all the way to the Tuamotus in 10-20 knots of wind.   Unlike our sails in past weeks and months, most of the time was spent on or just off the wind, which makes for a much less comfortable experience than downwind sailing.  One of the WARC boats even posted on the Whatsapp crew chat they had experienced “survival conditions” – well, it wasn’t that bad for us but nonetheless we were looking forward to getting there …..  Our first atoll was Raroia, the atoll where the Kontiki was shipwrecked some 50 years ago.  Our plan was to anchor right by the motu where the Kontiki landed, which is on the South West side of the atoll. 

 

How do you determine when is the best time to get into a lagoon?  Obviously, you want there to be no or little current – “slack water”.  In the first instance, the time of slack water depends on the time of low and high water.  When the tide is low or high, the water should not be flowing in or out and the currents in the pass should be slack, right?  Wrong!  There are several factors which throw off this logic.  The first is that there is usually a delay between high and low water and the current stopping.  This delay could be a few minutes or more than an hour, depending on the geography of the atoll.  The bigger the atoll, the bigger the delay – at least in theory.  The second is that the seas breaking on the South side of the atoll (given the steady South East trade winds), will fill up the lagoon so in many atolls the ebb (outgoing current) is running longer and harder than the flood (incoming current), particularly if the seas are up and breaking heavily over the reef.  So the time of slack water at high tide is earlier than high tide because even at high tide more water has to exit the lagoon.  Conversely, the time of slack water at low tide is later than low tide since the current keeps flowing outwards even if the tide is low.  And last but not least, the time of low and high tide for most atolls is not really publicly available so it has to be interpolated from the passage of the moon. 

 

So how do you go about calculating the time of slack water?  A few cruisers – starting with SV Soggy Paws (maybe they have dogs on board?) – have come up with an Excel spreadsheet called the “Guestimator.”  It is a very much simplified calculation of the various factors that sometimes yields good results but more often does not.  And then there is another cruiser who has dispensed with the Excel spreadsheet and supposedly improved upon the accuracy of the original Guestimator - https://www.thefloatinglab.world/en/guestimator.html.  Well, it is 0700 – four days out from the Uo Pou - and we’ve arrived at the Ngarue pass into Raroia.  The Guestimators are saying slack water is in 30 minutes.  Looking at the pass, the current is absolutely ripping out and there are high breakers everywhere.  We are waiting another 30 minutes, then another, then another.  It looks like the situation is a bit improved and one of the other World ARC boats, a big catamaran, is heading in.  Not for the faint of heart:  2 meter breakers on port, some 20 meters away, standing waves in our path but only less than 1 meter high.  Breakers on starboard.  Top current:  4.5 knots outgoing.  All is good. 

 

Next task: heading across the lagoon to our anchorage by the Kontiki motu.  The charts do not show anything inside most lagoons – “uncharted” it says helpfully - yet the lagoons are studded with “bommies” – coral heads that stick up to or just below the surface.  The way to avoid those is to chart a course on a satellite chart – Google Earth is one option but there are two others.  These charts show bommies with great accuracy assuming they are properly referenced to the chart datum.  Again, volunteer cruisers have created properly geo-referenced charts from satellite images and make them available to others for free.  We have a separate tablet to run these charts at the helm station and I can upload the course charted on them to the chart plotter at the helm so I can have the autopilot follow the course.  We also have a forward looking sonar which detects bommies very well.  And lastly, one of the crew is placed at the bow with an intercom headset to spot bommies.  This system is complex but works very well – to date, we’ve not hit anything!  The Dangerous Islands are still dangerous – but we are able to control the risks.

 

There is another fantastic source of information about these atolls that I’ve not mentioned so far:  The Tuamotu Compendium available on the Soggy Paws website.  Therein I found a set of waypoints across the lagoon to the Kontiki anchorage which we chose to follow – after checking them on the satellite charts.  The first lagoon crossing was a bit exciting to be honest but our confidence in our system increased immensely once we were safely at anchor at the Kontiki motu.  The motu has a small plaque to commemorate the stranding of the Kontiki but it’s mostly a bird sanctuary.  The snorkeling was also quite good – a wonderful anchorage and we were one of only about 5 boats anchored in the vicinity.

 

 

A White Tern

Annous

Our next atoll was Makemo, a much bigger atoll than Raroia.  It was not originally on the plan but we had heard from other WARC participants that the snorkeling was supposed to be outstanding at a reef extending from the North East anchorage.  It was also within a day’s sail from Raroia, avoiding an overnight passage.  Retracing our steps to the Ngarue pass on Raroia was a breeze but the Guestimator was again wildly off:  4.5 knots this time outgoing current but for some reason that seas were more sedate than coming in against the current a few days before.  By contrast, the Guestimator was much closer for the Tapuhiria pass into Makemo.  Just 1-½ knot of current coming out of the lagoon. 

 

Not much of this atoll is sticking out of the sea!

 

The snorkeling was not that outstanding after all so we only stayed one day at Makemo. 
One highlight of our stay was seeing a shark of generous proportions sleeping under a rock.  We could just see the back half of the fish and it seemed more than 1.5 meters long!  We decided to not disturb this one! 

Big shark asleep under the coral reef

First ride in our new kayak

Reef shark

 

The next atoll for us was Tahanea, an atoll that is uninhabited except during the copra harvest season.  After a very early departure to make the Tapuhiria pass at slack water, we had a great sail to Tahanea and hit the Teavatapu pass there at slack tide – less than 1 knot of current.  Bravo, Guestimator! Our first anchorage was just to the West of the pass and there was quite a contingent of other WARC boats as well.  We met an Oyster 54 from New Zealand and they said that this was their sixth time at Tahanea – obviously we had hit upon a desirable place.   The anchorage is between the Teavatapu pass and another, smaller pass (Motupuapua) which made for an excellent drift snorkel. 

 

 

When these crabs retreat into their cocoon, they are indistinguishable from the coral rubble around them

There is very little soil on the motus in Tahanea – just coral of every shape

Magnificent Frigate Bird

Brown Boobie

Black tipped reef shark

 

But when we got back to the boat around 1600, we noticed that the wind had turned 180 degrees, putting us on a lee shore.  A large, black cloud had developed and within minutes, the wind was up over 20 knots and the waves were building.  I made the decision to depart immediately and we secured the dinghy and kayak and took down our sun awnings.  When we started lifting the anchor, it was now blowing over 30 knots and the seas were over ½ meter high, building quickly.  It was over 7 miles to the other side of the atoll from which the winds were now blowing – a distance that allows the waves to build to significant height over a short period of time. 

 

One of the dangers in these lagoons is that the anchor chain can wrap around a bommie which reduces the effective length of the chain potentially to just a few meters.  This eliminates the sag in the chain and its dampening effect as the boat pulls on the chain, resulting in immense forces on the anchor winch.  The result can sometimes be a winch ripped from the deck and a boat on the beach!  As it turned out, our chain had wrapped around a bommie and it took quite a bit of tricky maneuvering with the engine and bow thruster to free it.  The wind and waves were so strong that it was very difficult to keep the bow into the wind but Stewart and Jim expertly directed the maneuver from the foredeck and the anchor was soon on deck.   By now it was nearly dark and we followed the route we used to come into the anchorage to get back to the pass.  Getting through the pass turned out to be easy although 3 knots of current were running. 

 

So now what?  We wanted to get back into the lagoon to explore another anchorage so we didn’t want to leave for another atoll so quickly.  There was no way to get back into the anchorage in the dark even if the squall was blowing over.  So we hove to under small sails and spent the night hove to (drifting slowly) or sailing around slowly.  The squall was over in about 4 hours and we were back in the pass before 8 am the next morning.    The weather was beautiful and we soon dropped anchor at an anchorage at the South East side of Tahanea.   The place was outstanding and there was only one other boat – from the San Francisco Bay area!   

My first time launching the drone from the boat. Check out the video on the Videos section of the website.  https://kincsem-adventures.skipperblogs.com/videos

 

 

After two days of snorkeling and exploring we moved back to the pass in the afternoon to set for an early departure to our next atoll, Fakarava.  The distances between these atolls are quite big and there are only two times of slack water during day light:  one in the morning and one in the early afternoon.  So it is often a challenge to cover the distance between atolls in one day as there is usually only about 6 hours between slack waters.  Luckily, the current at Tahanea’s Teavatapu pass runs at less than 4 knots and the current at Fakarava’s South pass runs at less than 3.5 knots so we decided to leave Tahanea at first light once the [outgoing] current was still running quite hard to give us more time to get to Fakarava.  The pass was a breeze and we had double headsails out – wind from behind - for much of the day, for the first time since arriving in the Marquesas.

 

Fakarava is probably the most developed atoll, with some 900 residents, although development is still a relative thing.  At the South pass, there is a small settlement and one hotel consisting of a number of small huts.  They don’t serve food to non-guests.  At the main town there are a few more houses and there’s another hotel with a few more huts and a more upscale ambience.  But if you’re looking for a sundowner at 5 pm, there’s no place on the island that is open at that time!  So tourism hasn’t really fully hit here.

 

We decided to bypass the South pass anchorage and proceed through the pass to an anchorage on the South East side of the atoll, a very scenic place.  There were maybe 10 boats anchored there, including some 5 WARC boats.    One of the highlights of our stay in Fakarava was for me a dive at the “Wall of Sharks” on the South pass and for Stewart and Jim, a snorkel at the same location.  The pictures speak for themselves although I couldn’t take any pictures on my dive since my camera is only good for 15 meters deep – the sharks are between 20 and 30 meters deep.  So all pics are from the snorkel, not the Wall of Sharks dive. 

Snorkeling right of the dock at the South Pass lodge

 

Beach BBQ with some of the WARC crew and other cruisers anchored in the South East corner of Fakarava

 

After a couple of days, we moved to the anchorage by the main town on Fakarava because there are a couple of stores there where we could replenish our provisions.  The anchorage was delightful and we rented bikes to explore some more of Fakarava.

Brown Noddies are nice to look at but make a mess of the foredeck!

 

Defunct lighthouse

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