Endless Days

A first has been reached today during this trip, I’m bored! The cats, like Cleo above, are pros at it but I’m a little lost. I’ve already been swimming and snorkeling and saw a new type of tang and a pretty large moray eel. Dinner is partially prepared and it’s too early to do more. It’s too late to do laundry and our bed has clean sheets. The boat’s water line is clean, we’ve been to the outer beach and found more shells. All the kids have been entertaining themselves swimming for a while and now are at the beach hunting for coconut crabs and setting up traps for them. The head is clean, the galley (mostly) too. I dug around in the deep stores for peppercorns, found them, and re-filled the pepper grinder. What a good feeling. There are certainly some things I could do that would require turning on the internet or getting dirty but that can be tomorrow. Writing here seems like a good way to spend some time before dinner, it’s been a while! 

When I left off our last post we were hiding from a maramu, a stronger wind event for a few days, in the SE corner of Fakarava atoll. We were close enough to shore to swim to it and snorkel around. A short walk through the palms and some undergrowth leads to the outer shore where there’s lots to explore. Many shells to find, shallow waters to wander when the tide is out and when the waves are not crashing over the reef, and we’re still looking for a few more anchor chain floats. Out there we pick up trash and add it to the pile that someone will hopefully come by and burn someday. I don’t know if that’s really better than letting it degrade in the sun, burning plastic just seems so wrong. Maybe it’s better than trash on the beach.

On my birthday (50!) we were in this corner too. I had made sourdough english muffins for the first time, dad would have loved them. Greg fried some precious bacon and we had the Liston family favorite breakfast of muffins and cheese sauce. After that we invited Ohana’s crew onboard and motored down to the South Pass for the afternoon. We anchored Rocket Science and took both dinghies out the atoll’s pass and tied them to a buoy while we got all situated in our gear. With a few people hanging onto the rafted dinghies we cast off from the buoy and focused on the water below us. It was clear all the way to the bottom which dropped off steeply and consistently. It got dark before you couldn’t see through the crystal clear water anymore. Looking around we were overwhelmed with corals, fish, invertebrates, sharks, and the beautiful darkening blues of the depths. The current was slowly flowing into the atoll and we floated along, diving towards the bottom to get a better view of something when we wanted it. There were grey, black-tipped, and other kinds of sharks but not too too many of them like in the documentary “700 Sharks” that was filmed here. It is a pretty famous dive site and on shore there are a few dive companies that host divers from all over in tiny huts over the water. Pretty awesome spot. The amazing day was rounded out by making gyoza on Ohana in hats, a cake by Klara, and some sweet art and cards made just for me. 

Griffin’s birthday (13!) was a few days later and we moved over to anchor at the pass where Morning Stars met back up with us and we all rafted up as the weather was pretty calm. We’re so used to rafting up with friends on their boats it’s weird that it’s not the norm here. Griffin also chose muffins and cheese sauce for breakfast, cheers again to dad. We went to the pass to do another float through but first we tied up the dinghies near the dive docks where they sometimes feed the sharks in shallow waters. Griffin’s goal was to find a shark tooth and all the kids were game to look for them. Klara and I started walking and swimming in the shallows and right away she found a medium sized shark tooth! So exciting. We all had a great time snorkeling around and looking for more amongst the sand, coral, and fish but no luck. We’ll have to come back to look more as the current in the pass would turn soon and we needed to get over there. The wind had started to build so Greg and Niclas stayed on the raft of big boats, everyone else did another amazing float through. I’m glad I’m not the only one so enthralled by the soap opera of life that is observed on the reef. The day finished with Griffin’s choice of a sushi dinner party with some tuna that Morning Stars shared, yum. 

With the wind picking up we broke up the raft and went back to the corner where we’d be in the lee of a motu. Greg started using the term “motu” and I had to look it up- the atoll is made up of the inner water or lagoon and the surrounding motus, they’re whatever is sticking up out of the water in the atoll. We went to hang out on the ocean side of the motu where there were lots of shells to look through and we had a picnic with leftover birthday sushi. On the outer beaches there are lots of rocks with either a negative or positive impression of coral and shells in it. The negative impressions make sense from when the now sunken volcano poured out its lava but I don’t get the positive impressions. It’s mind blowing to imagine the age and life of an atoll and I’d love to learn more about their geology.

A few more days down in the corner included halyard swinging on Ohana for the kids, swimming for exercise (with my snorkel and mask still counts?), a super mega yacht as a neighbor, and lots of fun with friends and then it was time to go back up to the north end. Sadly, Ohana is headed off to Rangiroa in the NW corner of the Tuomotus. At first we thought we may go with them but it’s against the wind from where we want to head and just doesn’t make sense. We had a few final days really enjoying the big groups company and then we said good bye to our dear friends. We’ll keep up with them online and I won’t be surprised if we meet them again somewhere in the future.

We had a bunch of other kid boats to meet up with and we headed to a new atoll that’s just to the north of Fakarava called Toau. It’s pass is east facing and the anchorage just inside it is where we found them. They all are into diving the pass but even just snorkeling around nearby in the crystal clear water is pretty great. This group of boats has been hanging out together a while and is tons of fun. Griffin is getting less fearful of sharks and quite fascinated in all the details about their lives, I see a school project in the future! An art on shore morning was organized for the kids and though Griffin didn’t do much I had fun painting and helping some of the kids. We moved down to the corner of Toau for something new and had an amazing evening of more paella and fired dough balls and a huge group of fantastic people. Many of the group needed to move on as well so we said goodbye to them and headed back up north of the atoll entrance to avoid weather. The snorkeling near there was amazing, some of the best inner atoll diversity we’ve seen. All of us enjoyed a few hours of swimming around a giant bommy where we saw sharks and fish of all sorts, a huge turtle, and lots of unusual corals and invertebrates. Morning Stars left to go back to Fakarava one day and we followed the next. Exiting the pass looked intimidating from afar but as we got close we were able to find a place that was deep but with fewer really big waves. As we went through them so easily and smoothly Greg, who had been pretty nervous about it all, exclaimed how much he loves this boat. Good job Rocket Science, I think we’ll be back to Toau again.