A marae is an cultural and religious place in the Polynesian culture. The Marae Tainu’u seems to be a very important one as could be that Polynesians started from here to move to other islands, covering an area from the Easter Island on the SE, NZ in the SW, and Hawaii in the N. This is a very huge triangular area where the Polynesian culture and region is the original one.

Like the day before we took the tender to the now well-known dinghy dock at the marina.

At the marina exit we started thumbing and the first car stopped in the large entrance area. We’re first thought the lady driver stopped for us but then we saw her talking to two men who wanted to leave the marina by car. We thought we misunderstood and walked away. When she saw that, she gave us a signal to go get in the car while she kept talking with the two men.

A multi tasking lady!

On the way to the marae it turned out that her grandmother is from Huahine Island east of Raiatea and that she lived in quite some countries around the world. However, for the last part of her life she wants to be on Raiatea.

At the end of an interesting ride weight lively conversations, she dropped us at the marae.

It was interesting to see what remained from the original marae. Only one area framed with stones was left this area had even only 1 layer of stones. Normally I counted mostly 5. However, it’s again to be seen that they respect trees when the built the marae.

As for the number of stone framed areas I saw in other maraes 3 – 5; here it’s only one

Looking at the well maintained christian church, I got the impression that the stones from the marae were used to build the church. A good way to kill the non-christian “competitor”.

At the most western part there are huge stone plates partially inserted into the ground. The part which is above ground is about 3 m high. The thickness between 1/2 – 1 m. Some of these stones are definitely made from coral material of the reef. Some could be of volcanic origin.

I wonder how they could make these stones, transport then to this place and put them well aligned in the ground.

From the marae, we walked over next door to a small boat harbor that is under construction. We had great view of the inner and outer reefs.

Then we walked a bit in direction “home” and passed a fruit & vegetable stand where two elderly ladies sold their produce. The ladies, one was sitting on the ground, the other with a hat on her head, was the active one. She did most of the talking, showed us and explained the produce when we asked. She was the one who opened small bananas, pinched with her fingers a little brown spot at end away and gave it to us. So, first we had to try a few bananas, which tasted as always excellent despite their peel already covered with dark spots. I wonder if I can ever eat the tasteless, agro-chemicals filled, and most likely gen manipulated bananas sold in supermarkets of the “rich countries” from the big fruit companies.

We got to taste lime and mango marmelade. We were asked to take some just with our fingers. The lime one was pretty delicious. So we got one. We also got maniok for the first time, and we got what they called “bonbon de coco”. A mixture of shredded coconuts meat and sugar, maybe with a bit of lime juice. We also bought some. Thus, we left with all these new things we found and a papaya. At the end the lady with the hat, put some sweat potatoes in our bag as a little present. “Merci beaucoup ; maruru”, “bonne journée” and we left. They were happy and were happy.

Pretty quickly we got a lift to the dinghy dock. The driver showed me the entrance of the trail I wanted to use next day.

For dinner Sabine made something delicious with maniok and the lime marmalade.

A good day came to an end.

When I got up at 0700 to continue preparing dough for bread, it was a windless, sunny day. Later on we had a few short rain showers, got a bit of wind, but mostly a lot of sun. It was nice looking at the emerald green water around MaRe, watching boats leaving and boats coming.
Also the view over to Bora-Bora was interesting. Sometimes the mountains had a lei of clouds around their heads, then all was clear and now all is tainted in the pale orange-red from the sunset.

Sabine did her yoga at the bow and I kneaded my dough immediately after I got up.
During a proofing time of the dough, I went to the bow and did my usual fitness training. For a too long time it didn’t do it. Now I want to go back to my 5 times a week pattern. It feels good working out.

During the last days I developed a new idea for an alternative route from French Polynesia to the Kiritimati Island of the Line Islands. At the very beginning I first wanted to visit Caroline Island and then sail further N to Maiden Island to continue to Kiritimati Island. However, Caroline Island is not a port of entry, thus we can’t go into this atoll. The consequence was to sail roughly 1100 NM non-stop from Bora-Bora to Kiritimati Island. Not nothing special. About half the Atlantic or a quarter of the long Pacific non-stop sail.

A few days ago, during a hike, I met Ralf & Nora. They plan to sail to Penrhyn Island on their way to Samoa.

Thus, Penrhyn Island was in my mind and circled around there. It’s the most northern off the Cook Islands. (You can find it in Google Maps : Penrhyn Cook Islands)

A quick look at my chart plotter showed that sailing from Bora-Bora to Kiritimati Island via Caroline Island (original plan) or via Penrhyn Island is the same distance.

I sent an email about my new idea to Ralf and asked what kind of information he has. The return mail contained all what I need to know. Sure, I search additional information, but Ralf had sent the key points.

Having read a lot about Penrhyn Island, I sent an email to the Executive Officer, Puna John Bank to inquire about the entrance clearance procedure and needed documents. Let’s see what he replies.

Then I also looked for a hike in the mountains of Raiatea. The normal informations say always that a guide is needed. I did a lot of hikes alone. Therefore I looked for one and found one of about 15 km with about 600 m of altitude. It will lead me to the the 2 plateaus of My Temehani. I found it from various sources and at the end I found the trail in my OsmAnd+ offline map. That’s all I need. Sabine minds the 600 m of altitude, thus I’ll be on my way in the next days.

Now it’s past 1800 an I’ll upload this narration and start the genset and washing machine.

Based on information from the Soggy Paws compendium I identified a few possible spots.

Then Sabine found one a bit of off side of the normal anchorages in an app called Navily. Buoys maintenance by Anapa Pearls. The text reads “The mooring balls are accessible for everybody and one doesn’t need to go to the pearl farm or participate in one of their tours”. To us it sounded the usage of the balls are free.

” Sounds good!” I thought and plotted carefully a route from the pass in southern direction to the anchorage also marked in the Navionics Charts with a pee mark. (I call all unedited, mostly absolutely useless entries “pee marks” like a dog’s pee mark). This pee mark does not contain useful information as usual.

As soon as we wanted to tie MaRe to one of these buoys, a boat came and the guy told us the buoy is private and it costs 100 USD/night! My French is still extremely rusty but I understood the condition very well. I fully misinterpreted the statement in Navily, which still sounds to me the buoys are free of charge. For me the post is a typical SNS post far away from reality.

I considered always Navily as an SNS just focusing on boat people and for that I don’t have an account with Navily.

What I can’t change I accept and left the place and head to common anchorage grounds north of the entry pass.

On the way north we had again short and heavy rain showers taking quick turns with very nice and sunny moments.

During a heavy rain showers I saw 3 catamarans on PRT side at anchor and could locate their position on the sea charts.

It looked good to go between 2 of them.

When I approached the possible anchor spot, the rain stopped and we had nice weather to explore the spot.

It is at the inner side of the broad outer reef. Very steep descent on the inside followed by a shallow about 100 m wide sandy area with boomies only further out.

The hook was dropped at 5 – 6 m and MaRe veers her anchor in water, a bit less then 3 m deep.

Emerald-green water around us. A good wind, which keeps MaRe pretty much in the same position and let’s our SuperWind wind converter produce constantly electricity to charge the service batteries.

Not a bad anchorage!

At the WPT, I set the mainsail. But, and there’s always a but, either the wind in general came from a bit (about 10 deg) north of E or we have already a strong lee side effect into wind direction and speed despite a distance of about 5 NM from the island.

Mainsail needed to be dropped and the engines are propelling us now towards the entry point of the pass Rautoanui about 7 – 8 NM away.

And when the wind comes again, it blows on the nose. Thus, changing to engines was the right decision.

I’m sitting now at helm station and taking care of MaRe…

BTW when you open Google Maps or another map with satellite images, you can look around the island’s outer reef and can see the passes. The one I want to use is on the west side roughly in the middle of the islands. Or you also could see the passes in PredictWind when you zoom in.

The next WPT where I need to change course from 288 deg to 008 deg is only 12 NM ahead.

We got rain and but more wind. Running currently 4.5 – 5.5 KN.

ETA at the WPT is 0947. Pretty much the time I mentioned earlier.

While writing the rain stopped or doesn’t hit right now. I hope we have no rain when I need to get the main sail up.

We decided to make 3 h watches, starting at 1800 h and ending at 0600. Now it’s just past midnight, it’s my second watch tonight.

I had a good 3 h sleep on the sofa in the salon, where I always sleep to be ready to act within a second.

MaRe, good girl as she is, just plows her way through the nightly sea. In average she ran with 4.7 KN during the last 6 h giving us a ETA at the WPT SW of Raiatea of 0930 to 1030. That’s fine.

If the wind keeps like now, upon arrival at the WPT, I’ll set the mainsail additionally. This gives us more speed because the AWA will change to 90 – 110 deg STB on the final 11 NM leg until the Rautoanui pass on the west side of Raiatea.

Nothing special on board and outside.

Only one yacht is about 5 NM away on STB. She has weak AIS signal. An idea for the weak AIS signal could be that she heavily heels. But this is only an idea.

Her radar signature is also very weak, thus she shows up on the radar screen an disappears immediately again.

When I just checked the AWA again I gave MaRe about 30 cm more barber hauler sheet. She said “thanks” and increased her speed by half a KN. She’s a good girl.

So far for now.

… is typically the message I upload pretty soon after I left a bay. Today I’m writing the narration only at around 1900.
The reason for that it’s very simple: I needed to catch up with my narrations of the last days.

But now today’s story.

Got up just past 0700 and started immediately with clearing up the boat for departure. Then breakfast and continuation with preparations.

When Sabine took off to return the rental car, I went again under water to clean the rudders and here and there I found a patch I missed yesterday. Then the last few preparations and, add planned, at 1100 we pulled up the hook.

In the bay we had almost no wind, but when passed the red and green marker of the pass, the wind picked up quickly to 5 Bft.

The direction was free of the lee effect of Mo’orea’s mountains and I could see that we have an AWA of 130 deg STB. Pretty much what I expected from the wind forecast.

We set the genoa and used the barber hauler to open it to maximum.

During the day, the wind was very stable in terms of direction, in terms of speed it varied between 12 – 18 KN AWS. Right now we have an AWS of only 16 KN but MaRe still makes around 5 – 6 KN STW.

ETA for the WPT Raiatea S is around 1000 tomorrow morning.

Stomachs are filled with a warm dinner. Simple, warm, good taste.

From now on I’m alone awake and enjoy the sailing through the night.

Yesterday, we got a rental car. A Mitsubishi Mirage. Small but fully sufficient for a drive around the island.

We took the counterclockwise route.

Also we had some points marked from information from the Lonely Planet travel guide, it turned out that these spots, except for one were more than boring.

We found a sign to a tiki village where we stopped to have a look. It turned out to be a very unfriendly place for “original Polynesian dances, etc.” with a lot of light show equipment. I asked if I could have a look at an open wall with about 20 old black and white photographies. However, the person was so friendly to say “No, come back on Wednesday”, and it was Sunday.

The nice thing of the roundtrip around the island were the views of the reef. Outside the dark blue-grey water of the outer Pacific contrasted with the white surf of the waves breaking at this very outer reef. Then towards the beach changes to emerald green water above sandy shallow patches, intersperses some times with dark blue ribbons where the water was deeper. At the end the water became light blue and finally clear when it reached my feet standing at the edge of the water on the sand.

We passed a fruit stand, returned and bought fruits and cooking bananas and a four pieces of route type vegetable. I assumed it could be yams or taro but I never have seen these vegetables before. (For dinner they where cut into kind of cubes of 1 cm side length measured with my caliper and fried. Turned out to be very good.) The seller was a bit a shy man, but very nice. At the end he gave us 2 bananas as a present.

Somewhere along the southern coast, we stopped and had our picknick lunch. A wild cock was carefully watching and approaching us. It tried to see if we give it already a piece of our bread or if it needs to wait until we are gone. It must have been brave in the past, because his tail was badly torn.

At the end we drove the street up to Belvédère de Opunohu, the place I recently walked to.

Along the last road leading up the hill, there is an ancient site with several ma’ares. I still need some more time and reading to understand them deeper.

While walking through the ancient site, I saw again the respect of the humans for trees. They never felled a tree to built a ma’are. Either a tree was included or was a at the edge of a ma’are.

Accidentally I found a trail. Cross checking with me OsmAnd offline maps I saw that the trail was leading down towards the road we need to take to drive home.

I let Sabine take the car to Belvédère, where I was already, and walked down on the trail. There was a nice stream following down the hill and I had to cross it. A nice lady was trying to get certain picture of a tree and I waited until I could cross the stream. “Bon jour! Ça va?” “Bien bien et tu?”, was the beginning of an attempt of a French conversation. Finally we all, started speaking German.

They were sailors. Ralf is German and Nora from Czech Republic. It turned out that they are interested in sailing to Japan. Additional they also wanted to pass the Cook Islands north but not that north like I plan to sail

We exchange email addresses and will now see when we meet again in Samoa.

They continued up hill and I down hill, where I met Sabine in the car again.

The car was parked at the agreed place and we went back to MaRe.

After a cup of cold coffee, broken rusk, peanut butter, and banana, I jumped into the water to continue cleaning the hull.

This time I tried to do it with my neoprene jacket to not feel the cold of the water quickly. I never use the jacket for that work because I thought diving down to 1.5 m is too difficult with the additional buoyancy. It turned out fine and I completed all, but the rudders, which I planned for departure day in the morning.

It was a whale watching by swimming in the water using snorkeling great watch them.

At 0830 we needed to be at the tour operator’s station. Paid our money and board the boat. We had our own snorkeling gear thus did not search which one fits. Altogether we were 12 tourons on the tour boat, plus the captain, and the lead tour guide and his assistant. The main tasks of the assistant is to make that nobody gets lost.

Just before we crossed the outer reef, but still inside, the lead tour guide gave a good explanation and what we could encounter and we need to do. I first considered it as boring but when I looked at the fellow tourons, I got the feeling that all these explanations are necessary. Later I saw that they were really needed.

The explanation did not concern only the whales but also bigger sharks which can show up when the whales disappear for whatever reason.

We even practiced once going into the water from the boat. Doing this as quiet as possible was important to not disturb the whales.

Being in the water, we looked down and saw a turtle feeding on dead corrals and what’s still growing on then. Plenty of fish in all sizes. Then we also saw a little bit bigger one with black tips; a reef shark. For most likely all others, the first shark they saw swimming beneath them. At the end the shark escaped at high speed from the tourons above it. Something must have frightened it.

Being back into the boat the captain used the 150 HP, 6 cylinder outboard engine to run through the water a maximal speed. I thought about my tender with it’s 5 HP 1 cylinder engine…
Later the day I saw him refueling from a jerry can at least 20 l of gasoline.

We moved outside the outer reef to a point east of Cooks Bay, then turned further out into the open water and back in direction of Opunohu Bay, our bay. Then we saw the armada of tour boats with even more tourons. About a dozen boats where looking for whales.

About an hour to two after we left from the pier of the tour operator, we saw them. I spotted a back disappearing just under water again. It was about 200 m away from us. The captain brought us as close as 100 m to that point.

Then all the tourons glided quickly into the water be and followed our lead guide. While swimming without makes a noise, I just saw the deep blue of the ocean beneath us. I was thinking about the other tourons and the depth of water beneath us. My conclusion was that they were too busy with trying to see the whales to think about the water depth beneath them.

While looking down into the deep blue, I suddenly recognized a deeper blue spot which turned into 2 deeper blue spots. Then I could recognize white lines indicating the edges of fins of whales. In the next moment I clearly saw them. An incredible moment. Two whales just at a distance of 50 – 100 m. To my surprise they were not moving, just floating in deep blue ocean water.

As I have seen plenty of dolphins which very seldom stand still in the water. Always on the move.

They were more or less standing still in the water in almost vertical position. Looking at the face of the bigger one I got the impression that she was watching us with a smile. “Hey you tourons, why do you want to see what we are doing here in the deep dark blue?”

After a while the smaller one very slowly ascended the movement of the fins were hardly to be recognized untill reaches almost the surface. It just needed to breath. All movements were very slow and relaxed. The fluke didn’t even get out of the water.

As smooth as it ascended, as smooth it descended again. When reaching the bigger one, the smaller one showed down and stopped. Again just standing in the water.

As the smaller one needed to breath twice compared to one breath of the older one, I can be assumed the smaller is a juvenile. The assistant guide also made that statement. Thus we looked at a mother and her calf.

Humpback whale calfs stay with their mother for a year. However sometimes they come back even much later.

It seems we had such a mother – calf bonding.

After an hour in the water it got cold despite I was wearing a rash shirt. That time the lead tour guide called for returning to the boat. I saw enough and not enough the same time. The impression these two whales gave me, went under my skin and will stay there. Curious about my next encounter with whales m

After we returned to boat the captain ran at full throttle. Also I had changed into a dry and warm T-shirt, I felt cold from the airflow. Fortunately the captain gave each of us a polyester poncho. This was good, because it broke the wind.

The day before yesterday, we took the tender for a long ride along inside the outer reef west of the entrance of the Opunohu Bay. Wind was down, thus water was flat, but it was a bit cool when we started.

Even with the shallow tender it was necessary to carefully prepare the route, because there are huge and shallow reef areas.

I used satellite images and placed waypoints on my OsmAnd+ maps for offline navigation. It turned out that there were markers placed on the reef, indicating the channel through it. I could verify these markers with my waypoints. Additionally we saw where local boats went through the water with their tour boats being powered with up to several hundred horse power.

Still early in the morning, when we arrived at Stingray City, there were the first tourist boats out already. This was on one side helpful for us because we quickly saw where Stingray City is on the other I also saw the negative effect of tourism.

It’s a pretty shallow sandy area were tour operators feed them. This makes the stingrays coming to any boat in expectation of food. Food – I learned later is tuna – is either kept as a small invisible piece in the hand of tour guide or placed in short piece of sewage pipe closed on both ends and a few holes along the cylindrical part. It’s the smell of the meat the stingrays find and go for. When a tour guide holds a piece of tuna in his closed hand it is not to be by others, but gives the impression the stingrays know this humans. A pretty good business.

In between the stingrays there are also black tip reef sharks cruising.

This all in an area where one can easily stand on the sand in the in the reef. From about 10:00 on, there are many tour boats coming and going and during the day it seems that there are always close to 100 people standing in the water trying to touch stingrays while the black tip reef sharks cruise among the legs in the water.

It appears that the people don’t wash there feet regularly because the sharks don’t bite into their legs.

In an area close by between two tiny islands full of restaurants for tourists, we saw a group of tourist getting heavy helmets on their heads being connected to hoses providing them breathing air. Equipped like this they went down a stair from a tour boat to the sandy area bottom to walk about 5 m to a dead coral block. There they position them for a group movie taken by a tour guide who places the aforementioned sewer pipe with tuna pieces inside just on top of the coral block. “Look dear friends at home, stingrays just swam around us and we could touch them!” That’s most likely the message attached to the video posted in any SNS account a few hours later.

I got the impression that most of the corals in this area were killed by humans touching it even standing on them simply they have no idea how sensitive corals are. Tourist business, for which nature pays the price.

I rather like the small stingray my granddaughter discovered happily in a shallow area in the St. Blas Islands, Panama, where the fishes are not fed to show up for tourist.