Ruby Slippers

between the Marquesas and Tahiti.  Until recently, their only name was “The Very Low and Dangerous Archipelago”.  Sounds friendly!  Many cruisers don’t even stop here, because they are, in fact, quite dangerous.  Each atoll used to be a tall volcanic island that has eventually fallen into the sea, leaving land that is only about 5 feet high, with palm trees that go up to maybe fifty feet high.  You can only see these islands from about 8 miles away in a boat.  But, if you take it easy and enter the atolls at the right time of day (slack low tide, between 10am and 2 am, so the sun is behind you) you will find the most amazing sights.

An atoll is a ring of islets, all joined together, with a body of water inside the ring.  If you find the opening, and if you enter without being beat up by coral reefs, you are completely protected from the ocean outside, but you have all the underwater beauty of the ocean.

We are in an atoll called Raroia, not commonly visited by cruisers. There is a very small village on one side of the atoll, but we crossed over to the far side, where we are quite alone and very protected.  The water is an amazing shade of jade, and the visibility is at least 50 feet.  We can see where our anchor has made its home, and can enjoy all the fish without even going in the water!  Snorkeling adds a whole new dimension, however.  The coral heads are all different shapes, color and sizes.  There are so many different species of fish, we have lost count.  Molly said she had no idea there were that many variations of butterfly fish.  There are also a lot of back-tipped sharks, but they seem very shy and won’t come near us.  The beaches are white sand and palm trees.  You can walk from the atoll side to the ocean side easily.

We spent one whole day building a shelter on one of the islands. We cut down palm fronds, built a support and played like we were on Gilligan’s Island.  In my mind, of course, I was Ginger.  We sped back to the boat in the dinghy, made a quick lunch and had a picnic in our new palm condo.  That spurred Molly and Jessie on to greater things.  They came back to the boat and drew up plans, found a new island and are now building the ultimate shelter - much more high-tech and protected.  We plan to have dinner there tonight, making use of Jim’s beach barbecue grill invention, and the girls want to spend the night in their shelter.

We have been in the same spot for about 4 days now.  We need to get moving eventually, because we are running out of food, and are having trouble with our watermaker.  There are at least 5 more atolls in the Tuamotus I want to visit, then we plan to be in Tahiti around June 1. Before we left the Marquesas, Molly and Jessie found a couple boats with kids on board.  We hope they will be catching up to us soon.

Just before we entered this atoll, Jim caught a Wahoo - a very sweet-tasting fish.  We cut 25 steaks from it, which we have been happily munching on for the last week or so. Mostly we eat Dorado, Yellow-fin Tuna, Red Snapper and Wahoo.  We don’t catch it all - the local fisherman go out every night and come back with fresh fish that they sell each morning. The fresh fruits and vegetables on our boat go away very quickly, and are hard to replace.  After about a week of being away from a village, we are down to canned goods.  The last little village we visited, everyone was asking us if we had any fresh fruit!  They have only had coconuts to eat for a long time now.  We asked why, and they said they didn’t have a good Mayor - he was in Tahiti enjoying himself, and not taking care of his village.

There will be no new pictures until we get to Tahiti.  Hope spring has finally come to your part of the world!

Since coming to Raroia, we have found five octopuses!

On Sunday morning, we were doing some beachcombing, finally making it back to the dinghy with our handful of good shells, and having a hard time leaving behind all of the other shells that were just lying there on the beach calling to us. I was wading through the water with Mom; she wanted to wade because she said it wad good for her thighs, even though she had just screamed at two passing eels. She had just said that she was disappointed that we have not found any big shells when I looked down and saw what I thought was a big shell wedged in a rock. It was sort of orange and round, and upon closer inspection, it almost did not look like a shell. It was too blob-like, and when I reached down to pry it out of the hole it was in, it moved! Did I imagine it? Shells do not just wiggle out of your way every day, you know! …
Ah-ha! Now I know what it is!

An octopus! It was a little baby octopus that is very skilled at changing colors and camouflaging himself. The moment Dad saw him he said, “Dinner”, but luckily, he was just joking! The last octopus we touched in Daniel’s Bay in Nuku Hiva stuck out one tentacle and let us pet him, but this little guy was not going to give himself up that easily, no. We sat there with our hands in the water while he decided if we were worthy enough to touch him. Then we had to stay very still while he examined us with his weird- feeling suckers, or else he would disappear back into his hole and we would not get a good picture.

After a little while, we discovered three things about our new friend, 1: He likes Dad’s hand the best (probably because he does not flinch), 2: He likes my blue shoes but not Molly’s, and 3: He is very friendly once he gets to know you. Well, he got to know us all right, because we were not going to let him go until we picked him up. Note: Don’t try that at home, especially if the octopus is very tiny with either purple or blue spots.

To pick him up, we herded him into shallow water (Mom was taking lots of pictures, of course) and kept him there while Dad got a soda bottle that was lying on the beach and cut the top off. We scooped him up in the bottle and right away he started coming back out, first the tentacles, stick, slurp, squelch, and then the rest of him followed and he plopped right onto Dad’s hands! Now it was a free-for-all! Molly and I stuck our hands in right away. “Wow, this feels really weird!” “Look he’s crawling on my hands!” “He’s really sticky!” He was out of the water, but did we care? No! Mr. Octo did not care either, and we got to hold him! I guess it was sort of a win/I don’t care situation; we got to hold an octopus, and watch him turn colors, and he did not bite us or anything. After he fell off our hands, he just sat there staring at us. I don’t think he was very mad or scared; we did not want to injure or frighten the poor thing!

There were three octopuses that we definitely did not frighten. In fact, they frightened us just a little bit! When we were snorkeling on Monday, we saw two giant octopuses in their coral dens. I was sitting in the dinghy on camera duty due to an ear infection that did not allow me to go swimming. It was my job to watch what Dad and Molly were shooting with the camera and press “record” when they found something really good. That day we shot a lot of film, especially of the two big octopuses. The octopuses were squeezed into holes in the coral, but Dad could tell by the size of the tentacles that they were about six feet long! He also said that when he poked the octopus gently with the camera pole, the octopus reached out, grabbed the pole and would not let go! We set the camera down outside of one’s hole and now we have some really good film of him inspecting the camera. We also got a lot of film of the bright colored fishes that were found around all the coral heads in the South Pacific.

The last two octopuses we found were small - smaller than the first one. Molly found them in the shallow water next to the beach where we built our palm frond house. We tried to corner them and get them into shallow water where we could pick them up, but they were too slippery. Also, none of us had any shoes on and the sand we were trying to walk on was not actually sand, it was broken shells, rocks, and coral. Ouch! They were slippery, but we did get lots of pictures of them changing colors! We will try to put those on the web as soon as we reach Tahiti! Happy reading! Jessie

more beautiful than I have ever seen.  The area was right near the pass on the southern end of the atoll of Fakarava.  The current there is very strong, but we were there at slack tide.  We tied our dinghy to a platform in front of a little dive shop in the “village” of Tetemanu; there are only 2 permanent residents of this village, but there are some cabins there that can be rented for a minimum three-day stay.

We quickly put on our gear, and swam out toward the pass.  In just a few yards, the ocean floor dropped away, and we were in a sparkling blue aquarium.  There were black-tipped and white-tipped sharks that seemed to prefer to ignore us, and so many different kinds of fish, we gasped underwater.  They were all swimming lazily through more live coral than we have ever seen in one spot. The variety of colors was almost incomprehensible - my mind just couldn’t envelope all that I was viewing.  There were black and yellow Moorish Idols, blue and green Parrot Fish, Angelfish, Unicorn Fish, Squirrelfish, Bump-headed Wrasse, and so many more.  Just naming them doesn’t do justice to the privilege of swimming side by side with so many friendly, colorful fish.

There is one type of fish, a Triggerfish, which looks exactly like Al Jolson - you can just see those big lips singing “Mammy”.  The Parrotfish have little human teeth, and their mouths are set in a perennial grin.  When they are swimming toward you, you can’t help but smile back and wish them a good day.  We saw two huge Moray Eels - not pretty at all.  There was one point where I was swimming a little bit ahead of the rest of the family, and I was surrounded by 6 black-tipped sharks, all circling lazily around me.  I knew I was bigger than they were, but I kept thinking that they might signal to each other that there was strength in numbers, and if they all attacked at once, they could conquer.  They evidently don’t know sign language, because they drifted off to find something smaller to pick on.

We snorkeled for about an hour.  On the dinghy ride back to the boat, we were somewhat silent and in awe of what we had just been a part of.  Slowly, we started talking about the fish we saw, and whether any of us had ever been in a more achingly beautiful spot.  We vowed to come back tomorrow with the underwater video camera, to catch some of this wonder on film.

The down side is (isn’t there always a down side?) we are running out of some pretty necessary stuff:  diesel fuel, propane, water and food.  This little atoll is not designed to supply cruisers, and the locals’ needs are few.  The one store in town is closed until tomorrow - they have been closed a couple of weeks, so I can’t imagine they will be very well stocked.  Our watermaker is still giving Jim fits.  We will head back to the “big” village and see what we can find, then proceed to a few more of these lovely atolls.  Molly and Jessie said they would like to return someday and go to each and every atoll.  I hope they get to!

All this underwater beauty has inspired us to make use of the 100 gallon aquarium tank we have at home - we will build a warm salt water aquarium, with a lot of the tropical fish that we have seen on our trip.  Jim gathered about 30 pounds of broken coral and shells to line the bottom with, to serve as the initial water sifter for the tank.  We’ve talked about how we could smuggle a few of the fish we have seen, but have not come up with a good way to get them through customs and back home safely.  It will be painful to have to buy them when we get home.  The “bottom” line is, our boat is getting heavy with shells, and our waterline is quickly disappearing under the ocean!

Have you ever tried to make a rainproof shelter out of palm fronds - with a bush for framework?  It sort of makes you feel like you’re on the Survivor TV show.  One thing is mandatory: you need a machete!

We were out exploring in the dinghy and had found a motu (Tahitian for “small island”) with what looked like a temporary shelter on it.  It wasn’t much - just a few dried up palm fronds stuck into a bush to make a roof - but we thought it would be fun to fix it up.

We started by cutting down the biggest green palm fronds we could find.  We laid them on the bush, weaving them through the old palm fronds so that they couldn’t fall out.  It took a lot of fronds to fix up the roof.  To get them, we had to find a palm tree that was short enough so that we could reach the bases of the fronds, and then we took the machete and hacked the palm fronds down.  Once, I tried using a palm frond growing on a tall tree as a rope to get to the base of the frond, but all I succeeded in doing was crumpling up the leaves and scaring away a little gecko!

While I was busy slashing at palm fronds, Jessie tackled the floor.  She took the bottom part of a frond and used it as a scraper to make the ground inside the hut even and free of rocks, which was no small feat.  Then, she laid down a palm frond floor that was thick + springy = Extra Comfy!

We decided to spend the afternoon at our shelter, so Mom and Jessie went back to the boat and packed a picnic lunch, matches, and other things.  Dad and I had tried to start a fire Indian-style, but we couldn’t find good enough materials and hard enough wood for the drill and bow.  It was a good thing Mom brought matches; they were very useful when our plan backfired.  Actually, it did not fire at all.  It wouldn’t even start smoking!

That was only the first hut that we built.  The second shelter was closer to the boat, but it was harder to build since it was a lot bigger.  We made the framework out of four 15-foot poles that we chopped down with the hatchet.  We propped one up between two tall palm trees, and leaned one end of three other poles up on the horizontal pole with the other ends resting on short, forked sticks driven in the ground.  For the roof, we must have chopped down about fifty palm fronds!  We split the fronds down the middle, laid three of the frond halves on the presently bare rafters, and tied them on with string we had gotten from a rope attached to a buoy (you can find a lot of almost-useless things washed up on the beach).

We laid down around fourteen rows of palm fronds for the roof, and then we chopped down even more fronds for the walls and floor!  We made the walls by just cutting the fronds to the correct size and tucking them into the overhanging leaves on the sides of the roof.  I had leveled out the dirt inside the hut before we started on the roof, and Jessie made another nice floor out of more palm fronds!

Our shelter was really fun to build, and we had a great time there!  We brought out a little fold-up grill that Dad had welded, and set it up on the beach over our cooking fire.  We also had two other fires to keep the bugs away, plus some smudge pots made out of half of a coconut.  We tried to figure out how to use a cast net we bought in Costa Rica, but the only way we could catch any fish was to stretch the net out over a group of fish, drop it on them, and see if any of the fish were too large to fit through the net.  We caught two juvenile groupers this way, and cooked them on the grill for lunch.  They were delicious!  To top everything off, I found two baby octopuses in the shallows, and we got to play with them!

We were sorry to have to leave our wonderful palm frond house behind, but hopefully other people can find it and enjoy it too.  Who knows, maybe we’ll build another one soon!

who runs a black pearl farm there.  There is one small islet (called a motu) that is owned by one family, and is run by the formidable Valentine.

Valentine is a 40-something year-old woman, who is married to Gaston.  Her sister, mother, step-father, and various nieces, nephews and cousins live on this little motu.  There is a lovely spot to moor right in front of their compound.  Valentine and her step-father, Philippe, guided us in safely with their small boat, and helped us tie up to a mooring ball.

Valentine runs a small restaurant and small pearl farm on their motu.    She and Gaston harvest coconuts and make copra, which they take and sell in Tahiti.  They catch, clean and sell fish to the ships that come weekly to a nearby atoll.  She is the pastor of the church, whose congregation consists of about 5 family members.  She takes care of her mother, who has had breast cancer surgery and diabetes.  She takes care of the yachties who come to visit, and sends Gaston out to fish for food.  She cooks, cleans, and keeps her little part of the world in order.  She refuses to sell their motu to the Chinese businessman, because her father’s dying wish was that the family stay there together, forever.

Valentine and Gaston (sounds like a Disney movie) decide when the restaurant will open.  We were there about 4 days, and it was only open one evening.  She visited the 4 boats that were in the anchorage, and informed us that dinner was at 7:00, and the price would be $30 per person and $15 each for Molly and Jessie.  There wasn’t really a choice as to whether we would attend; I think the price of the mooring buoy was that you were expected to come to dinner at least once.

There were about 20 people for dinner, and we sat at one long table and ate family style.  Valentine had made Poisson Crue, crab, tuna sashimi, parrot fish with coconut breading, fresh lobster, coconut bread, and coconut cream pie.  Just for me, since I am not a big seafood person, she “killed the old red rooster” and made a chicken stew served over rice.

It was fun to meet the other boaters, and find out where they had come from, and where they were heading.  There was an older German couple, who left their home in Frankfurt over 7 years ago.  They were on their second tour of the South Pacific, and were able to give us a lot of information about what little islands were “must-sees”.  They must have been in their early seventies, and had no idea when they would stop cruising.  They were still having a good time, and that is what counted.

There was a French couple there who were headed toward a new career in New Caledonia.  His expertise was in ecology, and he had been hired to help some factories on that island perform their jobs in a safe and politically correct manner.  He had been doing the same job on another island in the South Pacific for the past twenty years.  His 2 children and wife had been living abroad (and aboard) for most of their lives.

There was a couple from Spain, who had been cruising for at least 5 years.  They picked up a homeless dog in Surinam, who stayed on board their boat and barked constantly.  The couple spoke 8 languages fluently.  And there was us.  Molly and Jessie charmed everyone at dinner, and we heard many comments about how polite and intelligent they were.  Most of the cruisers thought it was sad that we only had two years to cruise, and thought we should just keep on going, right through the girls’ high school years.  They thought it was terrible that we wouldn’t get to see the Mediterranean, and visit Greece and Italy by boat - “the only way to see those countries”.

Valentine sold us some of her pearls, and I traded some spices and olive oil for two very big tuna steaks.  We went to church, and doubled the size of her congregation.  The songs were in Tahitian and French, and she and her mother harmonized nicely.

If you think of an atoll as a pearl necklace shaped in an almost-closed circle, each pearl is called a motu.  About 90 boats a year visit Anse Amoyat, which is the name of the small motu we visited. In my mind, it will always be known as Valentine’s Motu.  She rules over Gaston with an iron fist, and he meekly bows to her bidding.  When she says “fish”, he jumps into his boat with various family members and doesn’t come home until he has a boat load of fish.  Jim went spear fishing with the boys twice, and said he never worked so hard in his life.  They fished outside the atoll in the ocean, in very shallow water with steep waves.  There were large sharks all around, and the fish were wiley.  They seemed to know just how long the line on the spear guns would reach, and kept their distance.  Jim came back exhausted, but glad that he went with some real pros.

We left Valentine’s world and sailed to Rangiroa, the last atoll we would visit in the Tuamotus.  Since Rangiroa is the largest of all the atolls, we thought this would be a great place to stock up on all the items we desperately need:  fuel, water, propane and food.  Unfortunately, it is a very rough anchorage with none of those amenities, so we are leaving tomorrow morning and limping our way to Tahiti, where we will fill our coffers for sure.  The winds are supposed to be favorable, so we may not need fuel, and we have plenty of bottled water for drinking.  Who needs showers, anyway?  There will be some new parts for our watermaker waiting for us in Papeete, along with a couple packages of mail and books.  Yippee!  Books!  Plus, Jim and I will get to celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary in a real restaurant.

We will post pictures to our website from Tahiti.  Happy June!