The Tuamotu Archepelego

After a 500 mile crossing from the Marquesas, taking 5 days due to very light winds, we arrived in Ahe in the Tuamotu archipelago on Friday 1st of May, celebrating our arrival with champagne and popcorn. on the way William caught a tuna with what is left of the fishing rod. It was very good providing three meals. Ahe is an atoll, consisting of a circular coral reef broken into a number of small islands known as motus, surrounding a lagoon. It is very low lying, the shores being lined with coconut palms. Each Motu is about four to five hundred yards wide. There are coral heads just below the surface in the lagoon and in the anchorage making navigation a bit tricky and worrying.

The anchorage was very calm, so William went up the mast and replaced the spinnaker halyard which had broken when we last used the cruising chute. While the bosun's chair was available I took the opportunity of going to the top of the mast as well, just to admire the view of the lagoon from 65 feet up. We were visited on the boat by a young Polynesian couple selling black pearls. After some haggling we swapped a bottle of rum, a bottle of wine and some old wellies [rubber boots], for eight of them. A great deal!

We left Ahe on Monday 4th and sailed for Rangiroa, which is a much bigger atoll than Ahe and more commercialised. As we approached through the gap between the motus, the current was running quite fast. You can only enter and leave these atolls around slack tide because of the speed of the current. We were accompanied by dolphins at our bow again, jumping out of the water in front of the boat, a great display. Next day we took a taxi into the village of Avatoru, where there were two small supermarket selling a good range of fruit and vegetables. Everything is expensive here as it was in the Marquesas. Snorkeling is excellent on the coral heads with a huge variety and number of very colourful fish. Just like being in an aquarium.

We visited Gauguin's pearl, one of the farms where the famous black pearls are cultivated. There is a free shuttle service from the dock near the anchorage and a very informative free guided tour of the factory. We watched as the oysters were seeded and the pearls harvested by skilled technicians. The oyster is gently opened by inserting a wedge and leaving it for ten minutes to relax the muscle. It's shell can then be opened to 1cm allowing the technician to insert first a nucleus, a round bead made from mother of pearl from Mississippi, coated with antibiotics, then in close proximity the graft. The graft is organic tissue from the border of a young native oyster, and this determines the colour of the pearl. The graft grows round the nucleus. The oysters are kept in net bags for forty days to check that they do not spit out the nucleus, then strung together, encased in a plastic grid to protect them from predation and returned to the lagoon for 18 months. They are harvested and if they have produced a good round pearl, reseeded with a nucleus the same size as the harvested pearl. They can be reseeded up to three times, finally producing very large pearls when they are nine years old. This one farm has two million oysters being cultivated. Pearls are graded initially according to size, then by shape, round being the most expensive, then by the percentage of flaws on their surface. A 16.5mm, round grade A pearl was $1600!

Saturday was the local outrigger canoe racing day. It was all men, with at least fifty canoes which came through the anchorage, right past our boat.