Society Islands and Bastille Day!

July 7, 2001

We sailed directly to Moorea (bypassing Tahiti) with Morgan (my nephew) and Angie after an easy overnight sail from Toau. Moorea is one of the most beautiful islands in the world and Opunohu Bay ranks as one of the world's great anchorages so we wanted them to see it before leaving from Tahiti.

July 11, 2001

After a nice few days of hiking, biking and diving, we sailed over to Papeete 15 miles away. It is always exciting to enter a big city after five months in remote areas. Papeete has everything you need plus great French food both in the restaurants and in the markets. We anchored in Maeve Beach just to the west of the main city and used "Les Truks" to commute into town. Close to a hundred boats here and the anchorage was a bit polluted from the city, but fun.

July 15, 2001

Morgan and Angie left us, but were here for the Bastille Day celebrations. Lots going on! The Tamure (very athletic men and very pretty women dancing a seductive dance) is the centerpiece of the festival with a myriad of other competitive events from rowing, fruit carrying marathons, stone carving, and woodcarving. This goes on for the month. The large dance troupes often number 120 people with fantastic costumes. We went several times including the finals -- I was only interested in the culture though -- honest!

August 5, 2001

 Off to Moorea having given up on waiting for our new wind generator to arrive. We plan to replace our Air Marine wind generator with an Aero Gen from the UK because the air marine is far too noisy for us. It felt good to be back in clean water and a beautiful anchorage near the mouth of Opunohu Bay.

August 10, 2001

We motored all night to Bora Bora with no wind anchoring just inside the pass under a small island. By avoiding the town we really enjoyed ourselves here, a pleasant surprise as this was not our favorite place on our first trip.

August 17, 2001

We motored and sailed 120 miles to Mopelia. Only eighteen boats a year visit this small and perhaps the best atoll with a well-protected anchorage and some great locals ashore who make their living harvesting pearls. We also were lucky to be there the same time as two of the boats from Toau, LEEWAY and EMMANUEL. Diving, Boules, and some exploring ashore kept us all busy while waiting out a hard Southwest wind coming from the direction we all wanted to go. The pass here being extremely narrow discourages many of the boats from visiting. The locals ashore looked forward to seeing us. The remains of the Seadler, a WW1 raider, are in the pass for some great diving and interesting history. The shipwrecked captain, Count Von Luckner, sailed all the way to Fiji in a lifeboat only to be captured there. He wrote a popular book called THE SEA DEVIL.

Where to now?