Yacht La Novia

Onward to the ‘Iles Sous le Vent’. First stop Huahine, still sleepy and unspoiled, a faint echo of how Tahiti must have been 30 years ago. Eva from 3T gave a mob of children art classes on the beach, the boys spent hours wakeboarding in the still of the southern anchorage, and Thomas was totally gripped by the surfers riding a spectacular point break at the edge of the pass.

Needless to say he was itching to have a go, but the sight of the coral rash that some of these lads were sporting was enough to persuade him that it might not be the perfect beginner’s break ans settles for some popping lessons on the beach from Kelvin of Blown Away Too, who looks pretty well qualified on the basis of having only suffered 10% of the coral rash of everyone else who attempted to surf the pass.

There is some hope that this island could survive unspoilt. Locals have recently refused to renew land leases to 2 of the 5 hotels, which are now abandoned and there is no sense of the rampant development pressure that you sense all around you on Tahiti and Bora Bora.

Raiatea and Taha, the next islands in the chain, share a large lagoon. Tourism is taken seriously here and people keep trying to charge us to use a beach, although everything up to the very top of the tide is public land. As elsewhere in the world, traditional values have collapsed hard on the heels of the arrival of mass tourism. Poisoned as it is by it’s tourist industry, Raiatea lacks the charm of it’s neighbours, but we shan’t forget it - we had had our tender stolen there!

We spent a day exploring a river by dinghy and then kayak. A lush rainforest with a few ramshackle houses along the banks.

Bananas and Bird of Paradise flowers growing side by side on the riverbanks, birdsong and butterflies around us, cloudscapes and leafy canopies above us. George took the kayak back solo on the return trip. And then it began to rain. Not the fresh drizzle of an English thunderstorm. This was the real thing. It rained all night and most of the next day, barely letting us outside at all.

An hour after dark as the rain eased off, the radio dug us out in short order . Our friends Ocean Breezes, some 50 metres away, had heard boarders on deck and had chased them over the side before broadcasting a warning on the VHF. We checked outside and found our tender gone, a folorn 3′ of painter left hanging in its place.

I rang the Police to report that my tender had been stolen in the last few minutes:

“any chance of someone coming out to catch the bad guys red handed?”

“No”

“Only joking officer, silly suggestion really. How about I come in to the Police Station in the morning and fill in some forms? No bother at all. Only a 5 mile walk as someone else has got my dinghy.”

That’s more like it. Now I’m on the same page as the Police. Took no time at all to get the hang of law enforcement here. Just like England really.

Once I’d established that apprehending the ungodly is a DIY activity here, Chris came over from Ocean Breezes with his dinghy and we set off in the moonless night with a powerful spotlight to look for it. The river mouth was only 400 metres away and seemed to be the likely refuge for someone swimming out to steal a boat. Sure enough, as we searched the estuary banks a pale shape gleamed in the searchlight beam beside a rocky outcrop. We motored in to find our tender intact and ourselves under fire from a shower of coconuts from the tree line!

The tender’s new owners, doubtless well accustomed to the pace and effectiveness of policing on the island, were so taken aback by immediate pursuit that they had just abandoned it at the water’s edge, and retired to the safety of the trees to express themselves with a heap of coconuts conveniently to hand when we arrived to repossess it.

Raiatea and its people are quite the least attractive we have encountered since arriving in the Pacific and we cannot wait to move on to Bora Bora.

And so to Bora Bora, said to be the most beautiful island in the world. Its skyline alone would justify the claim, with a spectacular peak dominating the hills of the motus of its fringing reef. We took a reef anchorage for the night quite unprepared for what was to come. After dinner, Catherine called me out to watch the new moon set, no more than a thread of silver light sinking towards the skyline. As it disappeared we realised that the wind had left us totally and here inside the absolute shelter of Bora Bora’s lagoon, La Novia lay to her chain in a calm so completely still that she was anchored no longer in the sea but instead in the night sky itself. To starboard sparkled the Southern Cross, to port shone Venus. Across the anchorage, the Milky Way stretched a cloudy trail of light through the myriad sparkling stars in which La Novia lay.

After calling out the boys we found ourselves silent again in contemplation of a natural wonder outside of our previous experience. We will probably never again enjoy the combination of complete shelter, total calm, clear sky and lack of light pollution while at anchor, that has shown us the universe in such crystal brilliance. It cannot be photographed or recorded.

For once, we will just have to remember it. On reflection, (sorry, I just couldn’t help myself ) that is rather a refreshing thought in itself.

In the morning we moved around to the Southeast corner of the lagoon, perhaps the most beautiful anchorage in the Pacific.

The pass through the lagoon’s inner reefs on the way around there is terrifyingly narrow, shallow and tortuous and has intimidated everyone who has seen it. Once through though, it shields you from the crowd and keeps you well away from the resort guests on the other side of the island.

This is it.  The front page of the “Sell Up & Sail Away” fantasy brochure.

Perfect beach, calm, crystal water, the world’s most inspiring skyline behind you. Even La Novia’s electronics seem to know it and with nothing to fix we spend a couple of weeks in as close to perfect idleness as we could imagine possible. This is truly the life of the Lotus Eater, where nature’s beauty is so complete that no human artistic endeavour is needed to refresh the soul. Of course, the Lotus Eaters had no insurance policy, let alone one written in Dutch which says that we must clear the cyclone zone by the end of November.

Slaves that we are to the seasons, the weather window arrives and we take it, pressing back out into the open ocean towards Palmerston Atoll, a completely isolated island in the vastness of the Pacific, almost 700 miles to the West of Bora Bora, without an airstrip and with just 2 supply ships a year. 700 miles is not that far in the context of Pacific sailing, but when we arrive, it could be a different planet…..