We continued through the atolls of the Tuamotus over the next week. After the anxiety of our first entrance at Raroia we realised that whilst planning the entrances and departures is critical, picking Raroia had been one of the most challenging as our first attempt. The next two atolls at Makemo and Fakarava were both fairly straight forward once we had a decent handle on the times of the tides and the current flows in and out of the lagoons.

Makemo

After an overnight sail/motor we entered the lagoon at Makemo through the Arikitamiro Pass and anchored in about 12m right in front of the town next to the pass. Pouheva was the first proper settlement which we had seen in the Tuamotus, a town which at its peak had a population of around 900 people with 2 Catholic churches. It was also the first of what would be many appearances of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints we would see in the Tuamotus and the Society Islands. It was rather bizarre to see two Mormon missionaries cycling in the heat with white starched shirts and black ties!

The town grew organically from around 200 people in 1900 to about 900 by 2000 through the success of pearl farming. As a result the community outgrew the original small Catholic chapel. In 1975 the local priest raised funds to build a larger church on the same site. The smaller one is used for daily mass but the larger one is needed for the weekends when all the congregation is about 4 times the size.

One of the reasons is the large boarding school just down the road. As we had seen with the Indians in Panama, these highly distributed communities send their children away for education, Makemo provides schooling for most of the children across the nearby atolls who then board for weeks at a time.

We stayed ashore for dinner, at a pizza “restaurant” which served just the crews of three boats that evening in a dusty courtyard next to a shop. In the morning our friends Pia and Erik on Manyeleti arrived having stayed an extra night in Raroia. Manyeleti is an absolutely immaculate Baltic 67 yacht. We had had drinks on board in Raroia and it looks like a show boat , stunning. We invited them on board that night and this prompted us to have a well overdue clean and tidy of Offbeat! When they came over they told us that they were having watermaker problems so in the morning they rafted alongside so we could transfer the whole of one of our 2 x 400 litre tanks to them by hose. They kindly reciprocated with an extremely expensive bottle of rum.

Fakarava and Toau

Next stop was the second largest atoll in the Tuamotus, Fakarava, We had to be there to drop Phil’s wife Jackie off at the airport after her two week stay with us. Fakarava is designated as UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. It has a pass at both ends of the 30 mile long atoll. The south pass is famed for it’s diving with masses of sharks and rays to be seen. We headed in and then turned to a beautiful anchorage in the South East corner. A small group of World ARC boats was gathered there and after a day of snorkelling we had drinks and a BBQ on the beach.

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The following day we made the 20nm trip up inside the lagoon to the main town Rotoava. This time the channel through the bommies was marked which made it easier but still a huge number of waypoints to navigate.The anchorage was rammed with boats, it’s a convenient location for dropping off and picking up crew and also as a decent range of restaurants, we went to two, one a beautiful upmarket hotel/lodge with restuarant over the water and the other more basic takeaway in a carpark!

We dropped off Jackie at the airport, unusual as it had a dinghy dock and the terminal was a tent and then traveled about 20nm to Toau Atoll.

Toau Atoll

Our final stop in the Tuamotus was the smaller atoll at Toau. The atoll is virtually uninhabited apart from a couple of houses by a stunningly beautiful “false” pass at the northern end. It’s called a false pass because although water flows through into the lagoon there is no actual break in the reef to allow boats to pass through. We had a simple meal on the beach provided by a local family together with the crews of Okisollo and Indigo Wave from the World ARC who both arrived shortly after us. After returning to the boat we had a stunning show of sharks beneath our boat.

Our time in the Tuamotus was over and it felt slightly rushed. The following day we set off to motor in a flat calm for the culture shock that was the arrival in the bustling quasi-European city of Papeete in Tahiti.