We worked our way down the West coast of Raiatea and got to explore a pearl farm and another lovely secluded (and conch-laden) anchorage before making the longer trip across to the renowned island paradise of Bora Bora.
Captains Log
Monday 22nd June: Sore heads from the previous night’s BBQ necessitated a slow start to the day, and just as we were both starting to feel normal again we received another setback – our replacement solar panels would not reach Tahiti until the end of July (2-3 weeks later than when we had been originally told). With Fiji opening up its borders we had been hoping to move Westwards from mid-July, and now we would have come to terms with what was feeling akin to another mini confinement, but we pulled together the best compromise for this timeline. After a shoreside exploration of the limited facilities that afternoon, Aaron and Nat returned the food favour that night and had us over for breaded mahi and chips, which were superb.
Tuesday 23rd June: Aaron and Nat kindly volunteered an extra space in their high powered dinghy as they headed round to the windward side of the island for groceries, and so Laura accompanied them on a somewhat wet-n-wild style ride whilst I ran through some routine boat upkeep. We then made the 3nm hop down to a nearby pearl farm only to discover that they hadn’t yet reopened post-COVID, but that they could offer us a tour if we would wait till the next day. We had wanted to do some snorkelling anyway, so we had a relaxed afternoon and continued to work our way through the fish stores with a fresh and zingy mahi stir fry.
Wednesday 24th June: Spent nearly two hours fixing our reading lights, which seemed like a five minute job until I lost one of the wires into the inaccessible darkness behind the headliner and we were forced to deploy Laura (aka Master of the Fiddly Patience) and the coat hanger to try to retrieve it. Then headed over to Anapa Pearl for their incredible tour that demonstrated the full pearl life cycle in all its curious details (see Story of the Week below). Finished the day hunkered down below as a belter of a rain storm washed the decks for us.
Thursday 25th June: Parted ways with Catherine Estelle as they headed North for Taha’a to visit the distillery and coral gardens, and we wanted to check out somewhere new on Raiatea’s Western coast. We headed down two passes and found a delightful sandy shelf behind a motu and reef that was made even more appealing when I discovered a conch colony whilst diving on the anchor, and grabbed a couple for dinner the next day. After an afternoon spent prepping the conch, we headed ashore for a highly recommended restaurant + WiFi combo where we downloaded some poisson cru and podcasts.
Friday 26th June: A day spent in quiet thrall to our wonderful anchorage, watching the endless battle between wind and current over coconuts and getting things lined up for our sail to Bora Bora the next day. Laura still had a few more things to update on her iPad and so went back to the restaurant for a morning coffee, although from the pictures it looks more like she ordered a dessert. News of Fiji’s borders continues to be positive although it is taking time to agree the process for the new ‘Blue Lanes’ and so our extended stay in French Polynesia waiting for our solar panels may not end up being much of a wait in the end, which gave us some comfort alongside our luxurious dinner of conch fritters and ceviche.
Saturday 27th June: The wind filled in overnight as we expected and so we set sail for Bora Bora and enjoyed lazy sailing downwind on a poled out genoa. The main sources of excitement were me mistaking a lighthouse on Bora Bora for a Fish Attraction Device (FAD) and initially sailing towards it, and then navigating all the way round the Bora Bora lagoon through some very narrow and treacherous channels (see Parting thoughts below). The payoff though was getting to an idyllic mooring field where we tied up to a buoy and absorbed the striking scenery that surrounded us.
Sunday 28th June: We ventured off behind a nearby motu where our charts had marked some good snorkelling, and found that the protection of the lagoon was being more than offset by the strong winds. We decided to persevere, and were glad we did as we were immediately overwhelmed by fish (likely used to being fed by tour operators) and we had a trippy thirty minutes pushing overly eager fish out of the way as we tried to watch some rays. Catherine Estelle then arrived later in the afternoon, having sailed the majority of the way round the lagoon due to worries about their engine (major cruiser kudos points), and we were excited to welcome them to our new slice of paradise.
Story of the week
One of the things I’ve noticed about being in French Polynesia is that we are being exposed to a lot more experiences that are truly novel than we have during either of our previous seasons in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. That’s certainly not intended to diminish what we’ve seen up to this point, but the combination of having done some sailing in each of those cruising grounds before we set off in Serenity alongside the sheer geographical distance of the S Pacific from our homes has meant that we’ve been encountering the alien far more often here (see previous posts for atolls, pineapples, manta rays etc). The pearl farm tour that we enjoyed this week certainly falls into this category of expanding our horizons by far more than the endless shades blue we are surrounded by.
The Leeward Islands are not as famous for pearls as some of the other parts of French Polynesia such as the Tuamotus or Gambier Islands, but the numbers of farms around Raiatea and Taha’a are increasing and some of them have started to offer tours of their facilities to visiting tourists – Laura had identified Anapa Pearls as offering the most in-depth tour. COVID has meant that you can’t count on any business to be open, so we’ve learnt to call ahead and were worried when we learnt from the owner Summer that they hadn’t yet reopened; however, she decided that it would be worth opening for just the two of us provided we gave her enough time to clean up the farm, and so we agreed to meet the following day.
The pearl farm consists of an elevated hut on stilts that has been constructed just inside the outer reef, near a patch of deeper but still protected water for the oysters to grow. Summer and Leon (one of Anapa’s pearl surgeons) came to collect us from Serenity First as it was a bit tricky getting through the shallows to the farm, and on the way over we learnt that Summer had been born in San Diego but moved to French Polynesia after meeting her husband during a surf holiday twenty years ago. We’ve been managing pretty well on Laura’s French during our time here, but we really benefited from having a native English speaker as our host this time as the complexities of the pearl farm were difficult enough to grasp even in our native language.
During the first stage of the tour, Summer talked us through the anatomy of an oyster and identified the key parts of the pearl making process. We learnt that all oysters start as male, but then transition to female after around three years. The males possess the tissue capable of generating the most colourful pearl finishes, and so a small number of them are killed and dissected to provide grafts for the oysters once they have transitioned to female. These grafts are inserted into the reproductive sac of the female oysters along with a specialised seed that acts as a base that the oyster forms the pearl around. That all sounds ‘straight-forward’ enough (seriously, who came up with this first?), but then Summer highlighted that all this ‘oyster surgery’ had to take place through a less than half inch gap between the oyster shells, as opening them any further would harm them.
Struggling to grasp exactly how this surgery worked, we were then delighted to get a live demo from Leon on a selection of oysters that he had harvested before we arrived. We watched him work with a selection of tools including a dental mirror, long handled scalpel and a sort of pearl spoon and were amazed at the speed and precision of his trade. In fact, Summer had to keep asking him to slow down so that she had enough time to narrate what he was doing. In addition to seeding some first pearl female oysters, he also had a selection of older oysters who had been in the water with their seeds for around two years and so were ready to have the pearls removed. The excitement of opening each oyster was like Christmas as each pearl was a mini surprise in terms of colour and quality. Around a quarter of the pearls had serious defects (such as very irregular shapes) and this meant it was the end of the line for these oysters as any future pearls would likely be the same; however, for those with a pearl that could be sold, this was only the first stage in their pearl making careers.
This was the next piece of remarkable pearl trivia, which is that large pearls take no longer to form than the smaller one as their size is derived entirely by the size of the pearl seed and this is limited by the size of the oyster’s reproductive sac. For an oyster’s first pearl, this tends to be c.6mm, but then the sac stretches a bit as the pearl grows and so when it is harvested it can be replaced by a larger seed that in turn forms a larger pearl. Most oysters only live long enough to go through this cycle four times, and if they make it this far they will be making the largest pearls (around 20mm). However, only one in five oysters will make it this far and so this is the reason why these pearls are so much rarer and more valuable (especially if the number of defects is low). Summer then showed us a double strand necklace of these pearls in the shop that was retailing for $20,000, at which point our jaws dropped and I nervously asked if she could show us some items at the opposite end of price spectrum.
Thankfully, Anapa had a really good range of different pearls and Laura had been waiting to decide on a birthday present from my parents and also my Dad’s mum. By pooling this money she was able to afford a larger single pearl that had been partially carved by a local artist. The carving was done to cover up some of the defects of the pearl, but Laura didn’t mind as the end result was so unique and looked amazing as a pendant on a necklace. To have such a personalised reminder of our experience at the farm, the novelty of which itself was symbolic of all our time in French Polynesia, was a wonderful way to finish the tour (and hopefully made it worthwhile for Summer and Leon’s time), and as we parted ways again back on Serenity we promised to share our experiences with our cruising friends as a way of expressing our appreciation for the efforts they had gone to.
Parting thoughts
After our recent experiences with the Maupiti pass, I had hoped take things a bit easier on the sailing navigation front, but we had another butt-clencher (that’s a technical nautical term) in Bora Bora this week. The challenge here was not with the pass into the lagoon (which is wide and well marked) but rather with navigating the East side of the lagoon to get to the most scenic mooring field, which our friends on Two Drifters had told us was “unmissable.”
Before we had spoken to them, I had been tempted to stay on the Western side of the island as there are two narrow patches in the E channel that are marked as being less than 2m (the depth of our keel) on some charts. Other charts suggest that it is possible to stay in over 2.5m, but that still doesn’t leave much room for error (and also begs the question as to which chart is correct). Fergus off 2D assured me that it was manageable provided we had good light and the fact that his depth sounder stayed above 3m gave me enough confidence to try it.
So once more we had Laura up front frantically pointing left and then right to dodge the rocks and reef that looked shallowest, whilst I attempted to parse this with the best route according to the charts. Practice is certainly helping here and there was only one moment when my depth sounder jumped from 5.0m-2.8m that was mildly terrifying. Other than that, Serenity First mostly lived up to her name, and once through we agreed that there was no hyperbole in the description of where we finished the day.
Hey Alec and Laura, still reading and enjoying these updates, keep it up! It looks like plans have moved due to Covid, how is the rest of the trip shaping up? Still intending to finish in Sydney? C&C
Hi Chris & Clare, sorry this got lost in my email spam for some reason. Thanks for the support, it has been really nice to have so much positive stuff to write about about recently as an offset to the depressing 24 hour news cycle. Current plans are to sail for Fiji at the start of August for a couple of months, after which we hope that there will be an option for us to sail to Aus on temporary visas. At the moment it looks like the Queensland ports will be the ones opening to yachts, so sailing into Sydney is off the cards, but we plan to fly down there once we’ve got the boat taken care of and see some sights before we fly home on December 6th. How have things been for you guys – have you been staying on the south coast for the lockdown? Best, A&L