… a few hundred meters away from where Thor Heyerdahl landed with his raft Kon-Tiki after his epic voyage from the South America continent to French Polynesia. With this voyage on a balsa wood raft he wanted to prove that it is possible that the Polynesien Islands were populated from South America.

It was a challenge steering MaRe through the pass while still the water was running. In front of me there were two other catamarans so I decided to follow them.

The route through the pass was not so difficult. There were 2 markers behind each other indicating the straight line for through the Only the current in the pass pushed MaRe to the left or right. This required a lot of concentration at the steering wheel. Due to the still strong current it took a while until we were through the pass. There were moments were I was afraid that the sea chart is wrong or we never make it through.

OBM was looking out for coral banks at the STB bow and Ruslana at the PRT bow. But in the pass there were no coral banks along route we needed to use.

Then there was the challenge to cross the lagoon to the eastern side were are the good anchor spots.

I plotted in advance a route from the pass to the place of Thor Heyerdahl landing site across the lagoon zigzaging to the coral banks as indicated in the Navionics sea charts.

I followed my planned route and was happy that the coral banks along our route matched the reality. However, there were two moments where I thought reality is now different to what I see in the chart. This pushed my adrenalin level quite a bit up.

Having Ruslana and OBM at the bows was good. They spotted the coral banks and I could identify them in the chart.

At the end we made it well to the other side and found quickly a good anchor spot behind two other boats.

We dropped the hook at 15 m into sand and floated the chain with fenders to protect the coral bommies.

We arrived in paradise.