Bumfuzzle at anchor on Raroia Atoll.

Lots of coral bommies to explore throughout the lagoon.

Spider conch were all over the place.

Swimsuits and towels drying, and books in hand, is probably the most common sight around the boat.

Fish fingers for dinner.

We spent a few days in Raroia enjoying the quiet, the coral, and the spearfishing. But with a long list of atolls we’d like to visit, and a bit of windier weather on the way, we decided to continue to the next stop at Makemo Atoll.

This is what the bommies look like. The dark blue water is well over 100 feet deep, and then these coral bommies rise up almost vertically right to the surface. They are easy to see with the sun overhead, but can just about disappear from view completely if it is dark and cloudy.

We left on the afternoon slack tide, again with zero problem from the tides, and took off like a shot in twenty knots of wind on a beam reach. With only 80 miles to go our presumed overnight passage’s ETA was bumping up to 11 p.m. That wouldn’t work, obviously, for entering through Makemo’s pass, but if we got there early we should be able to tuck in close enough to hide from the wind behind the reef. If so, we’d just float there until morning.

And that’s what we did. We slowed the boat down a bit with a reef in the main, but we were still sitting just off the island by two in the morning. We dropped the sails completely and floated the last three miles in about an hour, then fired up an engine, turned back into the wind and motored just fast enough to let the autopilot steer a course back into the wind without running us into the atoll. Ali and I took turns getting a little sleep and waited for the sun to come up.

A few hours later it was time to enter Makemo Atoll. The pass was flat.

The wind was whipping and the anchorage in front of the “town” had sketchy holding, so I left Ali on the boat and ran to the store with the kids. I grabbed whatever fresh fruits and vegetables I could find, a couple packages of mystery meat, a bottle of Tahitian rum, and morning ice cream bars, paid the $400 bill with tears in my eyes, and raced back to the boat.

From there it was about ten miles across the atoll to tuck in against the east side where we could hide from the expected strong easterlies coming our way in a couple days.

Beautiful spot, and not another soul in sight. There were coral heads everywhere, though, spaced about 100 feet apart. We found a spot that was about as good as any other and dropped anchor. Deep sand buried the anchor, and then it was just a matter of getting the anchor chain to keep from catching on the coral heads.

Doing that required floating the chain. This works surprisingly well.

I quickly realized that just about every one of these coral heads had a Grouper hiding out in it. These were about half the size of the Grouper I was getting on Raroia, but there were a lot more of them.

After spearing a fish I’d head straight for the surface and hold the fish up out of the water. The blacktip reef sharks were always around, but if the fish was out of the water they didn’t seem to know what was going on.

Lowe’s swing becomes a kite in these winds. Had to use a long boathook to retrieve it this time.

The sand is really just tiny pieces of broken coral.

Ouest came fishing with me and took some neat shots with our camera’s new bubble housing.