Fakarava Diary

One thing or another has kept us here in Fakarava. 

First it was the weather, not just the wind, but rainy, very rainy for several days.  Other boats left in the pouring rain, but that didn’t appeal to us, we’re pretty happy pinned down right here.  Then it was the wind again – wrong direction, too strong, too light. 

Passage planning is always wind-dependent, but here in the Tuamotus, we have the added consideration of the tides.  The goal is to time your passage for slack tide in daylight, for both exiting one atoll and entering the next – harder than it sounds.  Getting the right tidal chart for the Tuamotus is not a simple google search.  There are many tidal charts out there, and most of them, including NOAA (US), are wrong by an hour, maybe more, when it comes to this part of the planet.  We’ve learned to rely on SHOM (France) for accurate high and low tide in local time.  We figure where we’re going and which day we’d like to leave.  We check the wind predictions – plural – there are five separate models on PredictWind – roll the dice to pick the best one, try to keep wishful thinking out of it, and then keep on checking until the day of departure – it will change each day, the closer we get, the more reliable it should be – we stay prepared to adjust our plans. 

If planning a passage that, all things considered, is more than 8 hours or so, then probably best to plan for an overnight sail, maybe a leisurely overnight – maybe leave at the last slack tide of one day, and plan to arrive at first slack tide the next.  Or if it’s an atoll a little further away, maybe a 20-hour crossing, then plan for 24 hours and expect to dawdle on the way to arrive near slack tide.  Or something like that, it all depends on the predicted length of the passage and the desire, our desire, to leave and arrive in daylight – and to bookend the passage with slack tide at each end. 

But anyway, what exactly is slack tide?  Slack tide is widely acknowledged as important in this archipelago, but it’s not widely understood exactly when it will occur.  The concept is easy enough to understand – slack tide is the short period when tidal water is completely unstressed, no movement either way in the tidal stream.  When we’re moving into or out of a lagoon, sometimes passing through a narrow gap in the atoll, it’s best to avoid having to fight against a strong tidal current.  

Slack tide occurs just before the tidal current reverses direction.  It’s called slack tide – but really we’re talking about tidal currents, not tides per se.  High tide and low tide are all about the rise and fall of the water, vertical movement up and down on the shoreline, measurable with precision, we know exactly when it’s high and when it’s low.  But tidal currents are all about how the water moves back and forth, horizontally into and away from the shore.  The ebb current is the seaward flow of water after high tide, and the flood current is the landward flow in a rising tide.  Slack tide occurs just before the direction changes from flood to ebb, or vice versa.  But here’s the rub.  The change in direction of tidal current doesn’t happen precisely at high tide or low tide.  Ebb flow reverses sometime after low water, and flood current reverses sometime after high tide.  How long after is a good question.  Answer, it depends.  Depends on the particular geography – in some places in the world, it’s as much as 3 hours later!  Can depend on whether it’s a high-to-low or a low-to-high reversal.  Can depend on local weather and how it affects the (non-tidal) currents at the particular pass.  Tide charts reliably give us the times for high and low tide every day.  But slack tide is more a matter of local knowledge.

Around here, the local dive shops may be the best source of information about the tidal currents, because drift diving in the passes is their stock in trade. At this time of year, drift diving in the south pass is particularly spectacular – especially tonight. During the full moon in June and again for the full moon in July, marbled grouper arrive in the tens of thousands to lay their eggs and sperm in the water column of the Fakarava south pass. Up to 1,000 grey reef sharks fill the pass in search of the spawning grouper. It all happens in the blink of an eye. Normally docile, as night falls, the sharks go into a feeding frenzy that lasts for less than an hour. It’s a mysterious and spectacular event – 15,000+ marbled grouper, the greatest known concentration in the world, here today and gone tomorrow.

OK, that’s enough about tides.  What else has kept us here in Fakarava?  Well, here in this harbour there is another peculiar wind factor.  Has to do with anchoring, or more precisely un-anchoring.  Has to do with the ocean floor in this harbour and elsewhere in the Tuamotus, which is often made up of a hard sand bottom covered here and there with coral “bommies”. 

Not much of an issue in steady winds.  We can drop the anchor, and days later, pick it up and off we go.  But in changing winds, as we’ve had here in Fakarava – at one time or another, we’ve had wind from every direction – the boats swing around the anchor pivot, clockwise, counterclockwise, willy nilly, following the wind changes.  And unlike the little boats we’d take out on Lake St Francis for the afternoon when we were kids, the anchor isn’t right there directly below the bow of the boat in 10 feet of water.  If we’re in 30 feet of water, we have over 100 feet of chain out – we can usually count on the anchor being out there, 100 feet or so directly in front of us.  The boats in the harbour swing more or less in unison, and collisions are avoided.  Usually, but not always. 

This is where the bommies come in.  If, in the process of swinging around your anchor, your chain gets wrapped around a bommie, well, it’s a problem.  For one thing, your point of pivot might change and also the length of your swing – putting yourself in harm’s way of other boats.  Or more accurately, putting other boats at risk of getting hit by you.  One recent morning, we awoke to see Dance Me dancing with Monsoon – there was pandemonium on the bigger Belgian boat, all hands on deck trying to avoid collision, or at least mitigate the damage – but they were wrapped on a bommie and they awoke to find themselves perilously close to Monsoon.  It was only after several attempts and great difficulty that Dance Me was able to raise their anchor and move off – not before the two boats became entangled, the bigger Dance Me grabbing onto Monsoon’s solar panel and then swinging to the other side and almost drowning Monsoon’s dinghy. 

Last evening we broke bread with boat neighbours – well, truth be told, there was beer, bubbly wine, nibbles and a delicious banana soup, but no bread.  It was a 38^th birthday celebration for Alex, the intrepid owner of Blue Beryl – a Dutch boat that Alex and his girlfriend Yvette sailed from the Netherlands to America, through the Panama Canal, and from there set out on their Pacific crossing when tragedy struck.  Some 1,000 nm west of the Galapagos, with another 2,000 nm to go before reaching the Marquesas, they lost their mast!  Everything went over – mast, main sail and rigging – it’s hard for me to even imagine what ingenuity and fortitude it took for them to complete that crossing, but they did!  With a temporary mast salvaged from a beach on Ua Huka, installed and rigged in Hiva Oa, and now with his father on board, they sailed her from Hiva Oa, and now heading to Tahiti where a new proper mast has been delivered from the Netherlands.  Blue Beryl left Fakarava this morning, presumably heading for slack tide at the pass, but not before the bommies had their way with her.  It took an hour or more, diving on their anchor, first with snorkel and then with scuba gear, before they could pull away.

Bill and I still have bommie management to look forward to.  As best we can tell, we’re OK, not much of a mess down there, but although the water is crystal clear near the shore, the visibility is surprisingly poor where we are, just 100 metres out. 

We won’t know for certain about our anchor until we’re ready to leave.  Unbeknownst to us until we got here, bommie management is best undertaken at time of anchoring.  You can tell the boats that have anchored here in the Tuamotus before, they use a relatively simple and effective anchoring technique that involves floating the chain by hooking fenders along the length.  Avoids entanglement and the risk of damage to your boat and possibly others, not to mention damage to the mini marine ecosystem that each bommie represents.

But enough about bommies.  What else has kept us here in Fakarava?  Last week, it was the supply ship that didn’t arrive.  The supply ship normally comes in every Tuesday afternoon.  All three stores in Rotoava are re-stocked by Wednesday morning, and then cleaned out of supplies by Wednesday afternoon. Timing is important, since we’re heading to an atoll with no village and no supplies, we want to stock up before we go.  Last week, the weather was foul and the ship didn’t come in – so we stayed put.  I should say, happily so.

The ship’s arrival two days later was more eventful than expected.  A real reminder of the remoteness of these islands.  Everything – I mean, everything – arrives on that ship.  If you need a new mattress, you’ve ordered it from Tahiti weeks or months ago, and now you are driving down to the dock in your broken pick-up truck to grab it as it comes off the boat.  I say broken pick-up, because there isn’t much driving to be done on this island, and parts are hard to come by, rare to see a new car.  Food of course, fresh produce and all manner of consumables, are replenished weekly from the ship.  Pallets of butane tanks are offloaded and replaced with pallets of empties – seems like everyone cooks with butane on this island.  Surprisingly, there is little to no solar power here – I think we have more solar panels on our boat than I’ve seen on the whole island.

When the supply ship arrived, we hustled over there to the store at the main dock to replenish our supplies of fresh produce.  That done, we encountered the new thing that is now keeping us here in Fakarava. 

At the dock, we asked about when and how to re-fill our diesel tanks – what are their hours of operation? can we pull alongside? or should we fill and haul jerryjugs? hopefully not, in our tiny rowboat of a dinghy.  Recently Bill found a tiny pinhole in one of our diesel tanks. Then more recently, we discovered that we may be leaking a little more diesel than we had thought.  Unfortunately there is nothing we can do to address the leak until we get to Tahiti.  Our fuel gauge is now reading just a ¼ tank – although it’s not very reliable and tends to read low – as a result, re-fueling before we leave Fakarava has become a priority.  We won’t get another chance to re-fuel until Rangiroa, the largest of the atolls and what will be our last stop in the Tuamotus before crossing to Tahiti.  So … imagine our surprise to learn that they’ve run out of diesel at the fuel station – and worse than that, they can’t say when they’ll have more!  Maybe on the next ship – can’t really say when that will be – maybe next week.  It had never even occurred to us to wonder whether there would be any diesel at all.  But here we are, stranded once again in a little paradise, this time waiting for fuel. 

One thing or another has kept us here in Fakarava.  Mostly it’s just easy and lovely to be here. Snorkeling, kayaking, cycling.  Learning from the locals.  Getting to know our boat neighbours. 

I’m not at all anxious to leave this place – loving the calm rhythm of this island and this journey.  No, not anxious to leave, but still, looking forward to being underway and the thrill of the next arrival.