Marquesas

Nuka Hiva is one of two options to enter the Marquesas group of Islands, the other is Hiva Oa but we chose Nuka Hiva as it has slightly better anchoring and supposedly fewer boats go there. As it was there were quite a few and one of them were Don and Sally who were delivering ‘Pantherra’ back to NZ. They had just arrived as well having come directly from Panama. It was good to catch up with them and have some celebratory drinks together.

Together with Don and Sally, we hired a four wheel drive for the day and explored the Island going right around it. Some of the roading was pretty challenging and over the back of the Island it starting raining and even with the Hilux in four wheel drive, we only just made it through.

We visited old Villages that used to be home to over 100,000 people before disease killed a lot of the population off years ago. The bush is extremely lush due to the warm climate and rainfall.

There local currency takes a bit of getting used to...

Amazon Woman

The local Brew

Typical Marquesas food, lots of fish!

Four Wheel Driving around the Island-pretty hairy at times!

Stunning scenery 

Don and Sally at Happy Hour-note the bananas hanging on the back of the boat

The locals are very friendly and unlike the Galapagos Islands, there are half decent supermarkets and fresh produce to be had here. It took a few days to wait till the swell was calm but we finally got the Gennaker Halyard up the mast and rerun and after filling gas bottles we were ready to make for the Tuamotus.

Tuamotus

We had to navigate visually again to get into the entrance to Takaroa reef as it didn’t have Channel markers and there were sandbanks and reefs everywhere.

navigating visually

                                    Stunning clear Water

Once inside the water was ultra clear which was great as there were a lot of things under the surface of the water to contend with being Coral Heads and many old sunken Buoys and lines.

We anchored in 15 meters and Barry and I went ashore to explore as Shelly was happy staying on board and read her book that she was hooked on. We walked for miles in the hot sun and were pretty pleased to find a little shop that sold cold drinks and Icecream! Needless to say the first can did not touch the sides.

We came down to the local wharf there and met a crazy Italian named ‘Franscisco’.

He is sailing around the world on his own in a Jeanneau 42 ft boat. He invited Barry and I on board to share a bottle of wine. By the time Barry and I had finished our small glass each, Franscisco had drank the rest of the bottle. Along with our new Italian friend, we wandered down to the local church and met the local Minister. I don’t think he was too amused by Franscisco seeing if the Minister could ‘broker’ a deal with a local girl to accompany him on his boat, another of Life’s  characters.

We left Franscisco there using the Church’s free Wifi and carried on walking and the Minister picked us up, we jumped on the back of his Ute  and he drove us back to where our Tender was.

The next reef was Apataki, which was huge, and once inside, you couldn’t see the other end. Once again, it was a challenge to find a decent anchorage due to the Coral Heads everywhere and we had to anchor in 16 meters of water to stay clear of them.

Stunning Deserted Beaches

We had various swims here and encountered a few ‘close encounters’ with a local reef Shark that was large enough to pay him some respect. I was cleaning the bottom of the boat and he was circling underneath me the whole time, needless to say the whole bottom of the boat didn’t get cleaned.

Whilst at anchor here, we struck a problem with the helm. The Helm was locked as usual to stop the rudder banging from side to side. But I awoke to the banging of the Rudder. On closer inspection, the Cable had snapped. We had no Helm and no way to fix it in such a remote area. I rigged up an emergency Tiller and we came out of the Attol exit and sailed the 230 miles to Tahiti using ‘Wally’ our auto helm.

mmm...

Emergency tiller at work

We are at present sitting here in the Marina Taina waiting for a new cable to be made up. I elected to go for a larger cable as the original 5mm one is vastly under engineered. Hanse do some great things on their Yachts but they compromise this by doing some petty penny pinching in other areas. The design of the Helm set up is not great either as we had to pull the whole back of the boat to bits to get access to the cable. As I said, they do some really good stuff and they do some really dumb stuff which is a bit disappointing. Having said that it could be a lot worse.