Honeymoon in French Polynesia #2
Well, It’s about 2:45pm on Friday the 17th, the Star Flyer is heeling to port, and we’re onboard as we leave Fakarava, Tuamotu. We visited Rangiroa, Tuamotu on Wednesday, taking a tour of a Tahitian Black Pearl farm. The tour was pretty interesting since they showed us how they insert grafts of other Oyster’s mantle’s and a round pearl made out of oyster shell to start. Then 40 days later they remove a black pearl from the oyster and insert a new white starter pearl in it’s place. The only downside to this is the crazy cost of these cultured black pearls… ($100 – $20,000 each). The guide mentioned that there is only one school in the world for culturing black pearls and we happened to be touring it.
After the tour we changed into snorkel gear and took the Zodiak out to a reef nearby. We brought bread with us to attract fish and after letting it loose I realized that I could have done without the attractant. The fish were CRAZY swarming about. I think I even got nibbled on by one of them. The crew was very careful to keep the boat and snorkelers from touching the coral reef. A local tour boat, however, raced over with tourists on board and essentially grounded their boat on the reef damaging a nice little section.
Following our snorkel tour we were back on board for the Cocktail hour and the boat was headed from Rangiroa to Fakarava. Dinner has been a lot of fun lately, as we’ve made friends with a bunch of other people on the boat, most of them from England. We are definitely the youngest people on board with the exception of one couple’s kids who are teenagers. Everyone else for the most part is retired and more than half of the passengers have been on the boat before. One couple has been on Star Clippers 21 times in fact.
Wednesday night the boat sailed through a pretty heavy storm with 30 knot winds and gusts near 40 knots. The seas were a little rough but it was kind of like being rocked to sleep. Our cabin is near the stern and for the most part we have a sort of circular motion up, right, down, left, then up again. It’s pretty soothing. We arrived at Fakarava about 10am Thursday and other than hanging out on the beach there were no planned excursions. We relaxed on the boat for most of the day then went ashore in the afternoon to see the folklore show. The folklore show was basically Tahitian dancers dancing during the sunset and it was very cool.
Then it was back aboard and for Cocktail hour again, then dinner. We sat with a French couple last night that we’d been running into a lot. They are on assignment for a newspaper, TV, magazine company in France to review French Polynesia and Star Clippers. We had a chance to talk to them about a bunch of things and it was good company. They played the movie “Rounding Cape Horn” or something to that effect on an outdoor screen last night but we were so tired we crashed before it started.
Today we decided to go to the beach after breakfast and try sailing the Laser Pico that the boat carries. There was a stiff breeze and other people had flipped the Laser already but we were determined to show them how it’s done. What a blast, the Laser is really fast and we sailed all over. We got pretty far out and at one point we thought we would sail around the Star Flyer as she was anchored out away from the beach. But we figured that might be too risky with the launch craft coming and going so we tried to jibe and head to shore. But our jibe was not the best in the world and we finally flipped the boat. One of the Zodiaks came out to get us at about the same time because they felt that we were too far from shore and it was good timing since they could help us get the sail, mast, boom, and everything else back out of the water and onto the boat. After sailing we wandered around the island for a while and then swam around in the water with the underwater camera. The fish and coral are really amazing at Fakarava.
Lunch today was outside on the deck with a “Polynesian” flair. I didn’t really notice the Polynesian influence but it was good nonetheless. We set sail about 2pm headed for Bora Bora, which will take a full day of sailing through Saturday and into Sunday morning. We went to dinner even though we really weren’t hungry and ended up sitting with the Captain for a while. We got to talk about the ship, and sailing, his career, etc. I’d already read it somewhere but he mentioned that this ship is the tallest ship in the world, the mast being 62 meters high. Another cool fact is that this ship, as designed, can heel up to 70 degrees under normal sailing, and can actually go to 120 degrees (that’s the mast pointing down into the water) without rolling over making capsizing a near impossibility.
Devon is very sunburned despite wearing SPF50 sunscreen. I have fared much better so far. The seas have been a bit rougher lately as we are in unprotected waters. It’s not bad at all, just more side-to-side and front-to-back rolling and some of the passengers have complained a bit. They probably shouldn’t have picked a smaller sailing ship if they were worried about rolling seas. This boat doesn’t have stabilizers like the big cruise ships do either.
