We had a nice, easy day sail over to Raiatea and picked up a mooring ball in Faaroa Bay. A mooring! We haven't seen one of those since leaving California. Picking up a mooring means you don't have to anchor - you just attach a line to a floating ball that's hopefully attached to good ground tackle. It's usually a safe bet that moorings are maintained well anyplace where there are charter boats (the charter companies see to it to protect their floating investments), and there are a lot of charter boats in this area, something else we haven't seen for awhile. These boats have nicely groomed people aboard as opposed to the cruiser boats that usually have lots of gear lashed to the rails and laundry drying on the lines and grizzled looking characters aboard - you know, like us.
It rained most of the night and more the following morning, but finally stopped long enough for us to take the dinghy up the river that empties into this bay. A jungle cruise of sorts. It was quite scenic even though there were plantations on each side, so it was a civilized jungle cruise, but it was still interesting to see the interior of the island. One small drawback of arriving somewhere by boat, is that you don't have access to a car unless you rent one or take a guided tour, so sometimes all we see of an island is the view from the water, so it's a nice change of pace to see the interior. There were some nice flowers growing along the banksof the river in some places and one stretch where the trees on either side met above us and formed an arch of sorts. Angie sang a bit of the "It's a Small World" song and Jeff took a lot of nice pictures while Fred navigated the dinghy through the shallow parts, and a good time was had by all. We made it back to the boat just in time to avoid the next tropical downpour.
After the rain and our lunch were finished we motored up inside the lagoon to the east side of Tahaa. Raiatea and Tahaa are two seperate islands that are close together and are surrounded by one reef that goes around them both, so you can do lots of inner lagoon sailing here, which we became quite fond of. It's nice to get all the tradewind breeze yet be sailing in water that's smooth like a like. Oh, and, as an added benefit, there is gorgeous scenery to look at while you do it. Things really could be much worse, and today luck was really with us because the clouds parted and sunlight came streaming down just as we arrived at our afternoon snorkel spot near a pass into the lagoon. We snorkled a little ways into the pass going around a really large, abandoned fish trap of some sorts. It was nets with buoys that were half sunk and was a bit eery looking. Then we came to spot where there were at least four and maybe six different Tahitian eels. Jeff kept seeing them and pointing them out, but he kept pointing in different directions and Fred and Angie weren't seeing the eels at first and began to think he was putting them on, but they were finally spotted by all. THen we followed a turtle into the deep part of the pass. Later we saw a lion fish out swimming around. This was a first for all of us. We had only seen them hiding in crevices before.
We anchored for the evening at the very end of Haamene bay, which was long and skinny and quite protected. We were about the only boat there and were about 100 yards away from the town dock which made it quite convenient to go in the next morning for more baguettes and phone calls. Next we did another lagoon sail around the north side of Tahaa where we wound up having an awful snorkel at a place called the river of coral. The guide book raved about this place, but clearly something bad has happened there recently because we saw more garbage than live coral, but hey, it's not a perfect world now is it. We left there and headed to the Taravana Yacht Club where we got another mooring ball and had an excellent dinner ashore at there restaurant.
The next morning we left for another short day sail to Bora Bora. It was quite pleasant despite the fact that we had to leave the lagoon playground we'd been enjoying.
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