Toau -- November 1, 2007

Halloween sort of passed us by. It's hard to keep track of the date and the day of the week, but we were on an overnight passage on Halloween. We were sailing from Toau to Rangiroa. Toau is one of the smaller atolls that we have visited and very few people live there. Near the pass into the lagoon is a village that has inhabitants only during copra season, which is when the coconuts are harvested and dried so that they can be sent to Papeete to be turned into oil. We did not however enter the inner lagoon because it is uncharted. There is a family that lives on another one of the motus. But they have a small bay with moorings for boats that is directly accessible from the ocean. It is a well protected harbour and could almost be used to wait out a tropical storm. The mooring are better for the coral ecosystem because anchors tend to damage the coral. The two sisters of the family each have their own working life cut out for them with their husbands and children. One sister has a small pearl operation and sends fish to nearby Apataki for export, and the other sends fish to Fakarava, raises pigs and chicken, and has a small pension. For us is was astonishing how many fish they caught each week; we were sceptical about how long they will be able to continue this until they have overfished. They mostly set up fish traps, but in the process of trapping the parrot fish, many of the other fish are killed as well. For them they simply supply the fish to meet the high demand for poisson cru which is a specialty of French Polynesia.

Toau is one of those islands where cruisers tend to loose track of time and a proposed week stay soon turns into a month. This however could not happen to us because my grandparents are leaving soon on a plane from Rangiroa, but we stayed as long as we could. When we first arrived there were nine boats in total, but by the end we were the only ones for the last few days of our stay. They cooked food for us and it was spectacular. The sister who has the pension had three close to us in age so it was nice to meet them. We have had so little contact with people our age because the majority go to the Society islands, especially Tahiti for school. Leaving Toau was quite hard because all of us enjoyed the island.

The sail to Rangiroa was a typical Tuamotu sail for us; we always seem to leave when there is barely any wind. Such is life! Rangiroa is the biggest atoll of the Tuamotus and it has three passes but they are only on one end of the lagoon, which is 45 nautical miles long. When we came in the pass there was some wave action and we were greeted by a pod of bottlenose dolphins who had come to play in tidal swells of the pass. They were overjoyed to ride on our bow wave. There were some small boats from the hotel with passengers who had come to see the dolphins and they got a great show because of our boat. The dolphins were jumping out of the water and then quickly slapping there tails on the surface of the water, something we had never seen before. The highlight was when three or four of them did this simultaneously. Dolphins are always overjoyed to see a boat in the water. They suddenly show up near your bow, give a show, and then leave as quickly as they came. Some pods stay longer than others, often depending on if they have turned out of their way to meet you or not. It's unthinkable how someone could want to hunt them because they are always so happy to come into contact with humans.