July 2 cont, July 3 and July 4

From Barry: Next was burning the trash. Along with our trash was some polypropylene rope used by the pearl farmers. It does burn, but first it melts into a gooey blob that wants to slide off the fire into the sand where it can cool down. Then we upped anchor to motor across the lagoon to the village. It takes a long time and a few tries for us to find and get the anchor down in a barely passable spot. Fortunately, there is practically no wind. I take the dinghy ashore to walk around town. One way through town to the pearl farm, where the days activities are over, then back the other way to the airport. A notice to passengers states that they may not take pies or decorated cakes on the airplane. I surmise that there have been "incidents" in the past that have led them to apply this new regulation. Of note is the prevalence of identical banks of solar panels with battery box below and TV dish at almost every house. Oh, and a number of the locals have a cell phone glued to their ear. In the middle of the night, the wind picks up and we worry about the boat backing into a coral head. Then the rain starts and I have to get up and close the hatches, only to get up again a little later to reopen them so we keep cool.

Atoll Fruit Dove

3 July 2012 We don't even wait for dawn to get up and begin preparing the boat for sea. Three hours later, we have pulled the anchor up without getting it or the chain tangled up with the numerous coral heads. We head into the morning sun toward the pass, trusting in the chart, our chart plotter and markers to keep us safe. We can not see anything that might lurk just below the surface. An hour later, we are at the pass and the water is rushing out into a maelstrom of standing waves and eddies. We line the boat up with the range markers, two poles that indicate the best course through the pass, and go for it. Man, it is gnarly out there. The current is six knots where we are, and we are not in the fastest part. It is like the base of Niagara Falls without the spray. Boy, are we glad that we are going out and not trying to push our way in. Lynne takes some pictures, but they don't do justice to the spectacle. Since the pass is on the west side of the atoll, the swell is negligible once past the outgoing current. We are going dead downwind. The mainsail is out on the starboard side, and we get the headsail held out on the port side with the whisker pole. This configuration is called "wing and wing". We are headed for Tahanea to look for the Tuamotu Sandpiper and the Atoll Fruit-dove. There are only a couple hundred of these sandpipers and they are supposed to be there. The plan is to sail overnight with our arrival timed for just past low tide mid-morning. But will the ebb be slowing down or will it be a maelstrom? In the meantime, we have to thread our way between 4 other atolls. These atolls used to be called the "Dangerous Archipeligo" because of the many atolls and strong and uncertain currents between them. If the motus, low sandy islands on the fringing reef, have coconut palm trees, they can be seen about 8 miles away in the daytime. The low-lying reef on the windward side can not be seen until about a mile away in the daytime. Tonight, with a full moon, we are sliding past the coconut palm covered motus of Makemo just three miles away, and I cannot see anything. We are thankful for GPS, good charts and a radar that can see the motus. In the old days, using just a sextant, inaccurate charts and dead reckoning, this would be a suicide run. You would hear the surf crashing on the reef just before your boat hit. Just twenty miles ahead of us is Katiu. As soon as we clear Makemo, we need to turn left to thread our way between Katiu, Tuanake, and Tepoto.

Tahanea

4 July 2012 In the morning, as we close on our next atoll, Tahanea, the wind dies down a bit. Lynne fires up the engine to boost our boat speed. Several minutes later, it sputters to a halt. Dang! After a very short night of sleeping, the race is on for me to get the engine working again. The vacuum gauge on the Racor fuel filters is showing an abnormally high vacuum reading. Time to change the fuel filters. When I refueled in NukaHiva, I had neglected to put the fill pipe cap on. It was two weeks later that I had noticed it being off. Had we gotten water in the tank? Well, it just so happens that that is the tank that I had put a small sump and drain hose on 14 years ago. After replacing the filters, I go to drain some fuel from the bottom of the tank to top up the filter bowl before putting the cap on. No fuel comes out. There was water in the bottom of the tank. Ten gallons of salt water! That also meant that we had ten less gallons of fuel than we thought we had. Eventually, I get the small amount of fuel that I need. Next was the task of bleeding the primary fuel filter, injector pump and injectors. An hour and a half after the motor died, it is running again. And we are just a few minutes from arriving at the pass. We are grateful that the engine problem occurred well before going through the pass and not while we were in it. (From Lynne: And I am grateful I am married to that genius, Barry. XXXXXOOOO)

We roll up the headsail, retract the whisker pole and store it on the mast, and centerline the mainsail. Time to motor in the pass. Out timing is perfect. The current is manageable, there are no standing waves and our entry is a piece of cake. I stand on the rat lines looking into the water ahead of us for coral as we spend two hours motoring across the lagoon to our anchorage. Why here? Well, on these few motus at the eastern end of the atoll lives the rare Tuamotu Sandpiper and Atoll Fruit Dove. We will look for them in the morning. For now, time to rest, de-rig the boat, put the covers on the dodger and mainsail, put up the small rain awning and start on the new list of maintenance chores.

Tuamotu Sandpiper