The Tuamotos: We visited Fakarava, Tahanea and Makemo
The Tuamotu Archipelago or the Tuamotu Islands are a French Polynesian chain of just under 80 islands and atolls in the southern Pacific Ocean. They lie between the Marquesas islands and the Society Islands and stretch all the way down to meet the Gambiers in the east. In Polynesian language Tuamotu means 'remote islands' and they certainly are isolated! They are the largest chain of atolls in the world, extending (from northwest to southeast) over an area roughly the size of Western Europe, although their combined land area is only 850 square kilometres (328 square miles) - about 1/3 the size of the ACT! This archipelago's major islands are Anaa, Fakarava, Hao and Makemo and we visited two of those as well as Tahanea. Australians and Kiwis will sadly be familiar with Muraroa Atoll which lies in the far eastern part of the chain. This is one of the atolls where the infamous French nuclear testing took place.
The Tuamotus have approximately 16,000 inhabitants and their own Tuamotuan language which was inherited from the Polynesians, the first known inhabitants of the island. Like the Marquesas, the Tuamotus are now a French overseas collectivity.
All of the islands of the Tuamotus are coral "low islands": essentially high sand bars built upon coral reefs. They are circular or oval shaped with the higher land on the north- eastern sides, and bare fringing reefs on the windward or southern sides. Not much grows on the poor soil, coconuts palms are ubiquitous however and the flesh is harvested to make copra which is made into coconut oil. The lagoons are an ideal place to grow oysters and a number of atolls now host pearl farms, which produce the famous black “Tahitian” pearls and of course tourism has made it to some of the atolls, although it’s easy to avoid when you have your own yacht. Underwater the beautiful coral reefs are teeming with colourful and unique fauna, some of the best snorkeling we have experienced outside of the Barrier Reef, and we very much enjoyed exploring these. 
Aeriel view of Makemo Atoll. Typical shape of the atolls in the Tuamotus
Making The Cut
From our anchorage in Taiohae Bay, Nuku Hiva to the atoll of Makemo in the Tuoamotus is 503nm. Each of the atolls generally has one or more entrances or “cuts” which are channels of varying depths and widths that boats can enter into the lagoon, through a gap in the coral reef. The cuts are naturally formed so each cut is unique in terms of location on the atoll, its depth and width and consequently the effect of wind and tide on the way water flows into and out of the atoll. It’s important to ensure you time your entrance through the cut well. Some cuts are known to produce standing waves if there is a strong wind-over-tide effect and you don’t want to be pounding into that coming through a narrow gap! If you have ever been to the Horizontal Falls in the Kimberlies you will have experienced how quickly a large volume of water can flow through a narrow gap, creating rapids. Well its kind of like that in the cuts, although thankfully most are not so dramatic.
Approaching the cut at Makemo, looks pretty calm. Nice and wide!
It’s not always as simple as approaching these cuts right on slack tide, as some atolls have a huge volume of water wanting to move out, so even at the turn of the tide, and sometime thereafter, water may still be flowing in or out quite quickly. Around the mouth of the cuts, on the inside and outside, water swirls and back eddies and can make it difficult to steer and to line yourself up with a narrow cut. You need to have both engines on and be prepared to use them in anger!
There is a lot of talk amongst cruisers about the best time to enter and exit each of the atolls. One clever cruiser with a lot of time on their hands has developed a very sophisticated “guess-timator” – as an excel spreadsheet it’s a work of art! We try to get our heads around it and figure out what is the best time to go through the main cut at Makemo, but give up in the end and take it with a grain of salt. Now we just have to time our arrival to be in daylight, as well as being no more than 1-2 hours after the tide turns… Yeah right! Making it to Makemo
We set off on Friday morning, about an hour or so after our boat buddy, Ollie on Mai Tai. He is sailing this passage solo so we aim to keep in touch with him on a regular basis along the way. We are two sail reaching with pretty good conditions but still we don’t catch him up until the following day. Great to get some photos of each other under sail. He continued to message us his position every 3 hours so we could keep track of him and await his arrival.
ITIKi underway
At 2am on Monday morning we put the motors on to ensure arrival in daylight and with a reasonable timing for the cut. Hooked a big bull Mahe Mahe but he jumped a lot and sadly we lost the fish, hook and lure. Dang! It would have been pretty good to see the look on Ollies face, as he didn’t manage to catch anything. It’s flat calm as we arrive so the entrance to the Makemo cut looks fairly benign. We can see some eddies and swirling foam on the water but wonder what all the fuss was about. As we come in we can also see some people “drift snorkelling” on the outgoing current in the cut, towing their dinghies with them. This will become a favourite pass-time in the Tuamotus. We anchor in at the township of Pouhava amongst the rocks and bommies, it’s not the best holding as the ground is pretty hard, but its calm enough for the night.
Are you yanking my chain?!
When you are anchoring amongst coral heads (bommies) it is important to avoid damaging the coral with your anchor chain, which can happen when the boat swings around and the chain rubs against them. The other potential problem of course is that your anchor chain can get wrapped around a rock or coral head, as the boat turns at anchor and this shortens your scope, or end up breaking something. It can be difficult to untangle this and lift the anchor when it comes time to leave, and it is not unusual for cruisers to need a diver to get them out of trouble.
Chain floating in theory...
So in the Tuamotus we have to do what is called “floating your chain” when I first heard about it I thought: you must be yanking my chain! What a palava! But it is totally necessary in these parts. It involves:
 Skipper on foredeck with boat-hook, it must be serious!
With the anchor on ITIKI set back behind the trampoline, the chain is not readily accessible to reach down and clip these floats on to the chain. We consulted other Helia owners and came up with a system of using a guide wire (VB cord) to take the lanyards on the floats back under the trampoline and into the anchor well so I could clip them on just like I do with the bridle. Needless to say our first attempt at implementing this was somewhat comical. The float lines got caught on the wrong side of the bridle rope and a fair bit of poking and prodding under the trampoline with the boat hook, along with some creative language, was required to sort it all out, much to the bemusement of the rest of the anchorage. In the end we finally got 3 floats on and it looked sort of ok, although probably a bit excessive for such a shallow anchorage. As there was no pressure on the anchor though, the weight of the chain pulled all of the floats together in a bunch – this could get ugly. Once the wind gets up and we pull back on the full scope of our chain, some of the buoys get pulled under water. They are still doing their job of keeping the chain off the bommies though, and we have made some revisions to the process for the next attempt. There are some pointy nosed fish that come by and start munching on the substantial green growth on our bridle rope. I hope they stick around and do the hull as well.
Cruisers' Committee Evaluates the Weather situation
As soon as we are anchored and settled we are invited for 5pm drinks ashore. There is one boat that we have met before, all the other boats we are meeting for the first time but they are very welcoming. If you believed what you saw on Instagram you would think we have perfect weather all the time, however experienced sailors will know that is not the case. We have all seen the forecast strong winds that due from the SE in couple of days – we later find out it is known as a “Squash” – more on that later. Everyone plans to move to another anchorage, either east or west, where the holding is better. We will go east.
Bommies appear from nowhere, this one was pretty close!
Makemo manoeuvres – time to play spot the bommies
Ollie arrives the following morning having done an amazing job going solo for the first time. We go ashore, for a shop and order fuel. I go for a snorkel in front of the boat while we are waiting for delivery and find some big coral bommies with lots of small but colourful fish. We leave around 2pm, which is getting a little late - everyone else has already gone, and for a while we could hear them on the radio working together to spot bommies.
This is our first time navigating inside an atoll. We have been warned that our electronic charts showing the location of bommies and shallows may not be all that accurate and may be missing information. We can use satellite images from Google Earth on our phones, whilst we have internet coverage, but there is no substitute for Mk 1 eyeball on the water. It helps that the water is crystal clear and sun is still overhead. I stand on the coach house and scan in front of us. Polarising lenses are a must and I also use the binoculars to scan further ahead. We have our sonar switched on, but unless you are going quite slowly its warnings are likely to be too late. There are bommies that appear out of nowhere and break the surface. On the electronic charts there are unlabelled circles that seems to correspond to the location of some of the bommies, and it turns out to be pretty accurate. That said, we can’t rely on a blank space being free of danger. We get into a rhythm of scanning, spotting and navigating our way safely to the anchorage at Makemo East.
ITIKI with chain floats in place
Anchoring goes much better this time. The water is just so crystal clear it is easy to find a good patch of sand and position ourselves well between the bommies and rocks. We find a larger sandy patch and nail the anchor, the floats go out smoothly and I swim the anchor and check it. With some weather coming we are much better off here, nicely dug in.
Makemo Mayhem
It’s the morning of the day the “squash” is forecast to arrive – what can we expect? how strong will the winds be? What time will it come? How long will it last? Looking at the forecast animation (I wish I recorded it) we see Makemo in a zone of no wind (blue) but coming up from the south-south-east is a sharp edged, dark, angry, red front where the wind goes from nothing to 35+kts. In other words it is going to hit like a bulldozer, pushing some nasties ahead of it.
A squash zone forms when an east-traveling high pressure system is very strong and/or moves very close to the tropics. The isobars on top of it are "squashed" together and the resulting trade winds are pretty strong. These southeasters generally arrive with a nasty cold front after the convergence zone or trough has passed.
We wake to a lovely, calm and sunny morning and go exploring on the SUPs while the weather is fine. It starts to clag in around 11 am and it starts blowing and raining. Not much we can do but sit tight and spend the day on the boat, catching up on jobs and keeping an eye on the anchor and bouys. The wind picks up overnight and the following day would have to be the worst conditions we have ever had at anchor. Fortunately we have never experienced anything like this whilst underway. The low atolls, even with a thick covering of tall coconut palms, provide little in the way of protection and the wind wraps around the bottom of the motus (the thin strips of land on the windward side of the atoll). We had thunder, lightning, torrential rain and incredibly strong winds. There were short, sharp 1-2m+ wind waves pushing through the anchorage as well and bouncing everyone up and down like a hobby horse. It was blowing 30-40kts consistently for several hours and occasionally gusting to 50+ kts. The strongest I actually saw was 58kts but would not be surprised if it went higher, I was just too scared to look at the dials! We just sat and watched and listened and kept checking our position. I will admit that at the height of it I felt like curling up in the foetal position and sucking my thumb.
Mai Tai pitching up and down in the storm
A boat nearby us broke their anchor bridle and lost a heap of chain through their windlass. We thought they were dragging as they were getting closer to us, but they managed to get it under control. They tried to call us on the radio to tell us what was happening, but with all the noise of the wind we didn’t even hear them. We decided to let out some more chain as well, which was pretty tricky given the blow, but in a brief “lull” of “only” 30tks managed to perform the manoeuvre. Given the circumstances we didn’t put any extra floats on our chain so our floats all disappeared below the surface, dragged down by the weight of the fully stretched anchor chain. Least of our problems at the moment.
It was pretty scary stuff, really uncomfortable, stressful and unsettling, but the anchor didn’t budge and we rode it out. We had been concerned that floating the chain might compromise our holding, but that wasn’t the case. The wind started to back off in the afternoon and 20kts now felt like a gentle breeze. It was a mentally exhausting day even though we didn’t get much done. Everything is wet, our feet are cold and wet. The bimini is leaking pretty badly as well, as the fabric has aged and lost its water-proofness. ITIKI has kept us safe again though and we are so grateful to have such a great boat and a fantastic anchor. I should mention that we also had the moral support of all the other boats around us too as everyone tuned into the same VHF channel and checked in on each other regularly as we all sat around on anchor watch, wondering what was coming next. Although we had some nasty conditions it seems it was even worse further east. We heard from friends in Raroia atoll that one boat got hit by lightning and lost all instruments. 70kts was the highest windspeed they recorded! Although I would not want to experience those conditions again it showed us what we and ITIKI are capable of managing.
Adrift in the storm
Not long after the wind had peaked, Warren from VA (another Helia) put the dinghy in the water to retrieve one of their brand new cocktail deck cushions which blew off the top of the boat. As he was picking it up a wave hit him and he flipped the dinghy. He was now sitting on the upturned hull of his dinghy, drifting through the anchorage in 25+kts. Somehow he managed to flip it back but of course he had lost a fuel tank and the cushion and the engine would not work so he was frantically paddling to try and reach one of the other boats in the anchorage, as the wind swept him onwards. He was already too far from us to retrieve him, Ollie was standing by with a rope, he missed that too and ended up at Sea Bella, the very last boat at the back of the anchorage. They looked after him well by all accounts and bought him back later when the wind had backed off.
A few underwater scenes: The water is oh so clear!
Magical Makemo
The following day our world was a different place. The weather is back to normal, paradise weather, sunny skies and gentle breeze. Ollie had spotted a bommie on the way down here that looked interesting and marked it on the map. We took off in the dinghy to try and find it, anchored the dinghy and went for a snorkel to explore. Ollie took his spear gun which made me slightly nervous but I am soon distracted by a really colourful reef, beautiful coral and lots of brightly coloured, fluorescent giant clams embedded in the rock. The water is crystal clear too. Its good to get back to doing something nice and normal after the trauma of the last couple of days.
The next day we took a morning dinghy ride to the east of the anchorage where we found a sand-spit, beached the dinghy and went for a short walk. The sand is quite pink here, in fact it is pinker than more famous allegedly pink sand beaches that we have visited elsewhere, including the Madelennas in Italy. The sand is coarse, more like shell grit and your feet sink in in when you walk on it. 
Pink sand beach
Middle Makemo
Its time to head west, via the town anchorage, but Ollie on Mai Tai had a huge issue getting his anchor up. His chain has seemingly tied a clove hitch around a couple of rocks! He is on his own this takes quite a bit of manoeuvring to undo. The rocks and coral heads can be shaped like a mushroom so when your chain gets tucked underneath it can be very challenging to lift it. Keith went over in the dinghy to push Mai Tai this way and that, and it took about 30 minutes of fiddling to get it unravelled. We had a few minor issues getting our floats up, one of the fenders was split and full of water having been submerged during the Squash. Heading back to town we could essentially follow the track we came down on, but it only takes a meter or two difference in course and you can be on a bommie, so we still had to keep a good lookout.
 Our own personal bommie!
We continued on the Makemo Central anchorage (Punaruka) which is 17nm from the main town. Again full concentration required to keep an eye out for bommies, particularly on our starboard side as the sun was coming from that direction. We anchored in close to shore amongst the bommies and our chain floating again went quite smoothly. The water is crystal clear and we have one bommie quite close to the back of the boat – checked the clearance with the boat hook - all good! It’s great to have a snorkelling spot so close to the back of the boat, in fact the water is so clear you dont even need to go in to see the fish! In the afternoon we went for a SUP and walked along the beautiful beach. There is a house here, a barking dog and some chickens running around. Quite a few hermit crabs walking along the beach too. They seem to have all the best shells!
ITIKI and Mai Tai at Makemo Central anchorage (Punaruka)
It is so still in the morning the water is like glass and the reflections are amazing. We decided to re-anchored back just slightly to the right to get more clearance on the bommies. As it was so clear we could see the marks where the anchor was dropped originally. Of course we are now swinging close to different bommies but we checked the depth again and clearance is good.
I went for a SUP to take some pictures of ITIKI and had some small reef tip sharks swimming around me and under the board. Ollie caught a fish from his dinghy so we enjoyed some sushi. We do have to be careful eating reef fish though as they can carry a toxin called Ciguatera, which can build up in your system and make you quite ill. 
Thats a bit close!
Exit Stage Left
We left our anchorage at Punaruka mid-morning the next day, planning to anchor close to the Makemo West cut for the night and leave there early the next morning. The distance to our next atoll, Tahanea is only 66nm so if we leave early in the morning we can arrive in daylight. Great plan, however when we got to the western anchorages they were just no good. To the south of the cut there were 2 boats, and one of them contacted us by radio saying there was no clear room to anchor. We headed over to the north of the cut and took a look at 2 possible anchorages, but one had too many big bommies and the other was too deep to know what the bottom was. We went back over to the south anchorage to take a closer look, taking a shortcut across the channel of the cut and clipping a rock. Oooops! Left a little anti-foul paint on that one@
The south anchorage was even worse than the other two. The two boats that were there said that they were not anchored but had their chains wrapped around bommies. Hmmm not a great practice. We were between a bommie and a hard place, literally! It was too late to safely return to last night's anchorage so we conferred with Mai Tai and decided to head out of the cut and do a slow overnight passage to our next atoll, Tahanea. We stayed in close contact with Mai Tai throughout the afternoon and could see him most of the night as well. Our poor autopilot was working hard to steer given our slow speed, we were making 2-3 kts with just a reefed genoa. It is actually really hard to sail slowly when there is enough breeze to go at normal speed, but we definitely didn't want to arrive in darkness and have to wait around at the cut for enough light to go in. Makemo was our first atoll, first time navigating the infamous passes into and out of the atolls, first time anchoring around bommies and floating our chain and definitely the first time we have seen 58kts at anchor! All in all a great learning experience and we are ready to tackle the next atolls so stay tuned for more! 
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AuthorAfter more than 5 years of (minus time off for Covid) and more than 27,000nm Lynda has finally got the hang of this cruising life Archives
June 2024
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