Week #11: welcome to Tuamotus

We made it to the Tuamotus! A whole new archipelago for us to discover... We had an amazing crossing between Huahine and Tikehau, probably our best ever with Wallis. And now get to enjoy the Tuamotu lifestyle...

Best sailing ever !

Crossing between Huahine and Tikehau (190nm) took us the same amount of time (48h) as when we sailed back to Raiatea from Maupihaa (140nm). It makes a big difference to sail downwind instead of against the wind!

As it is quite rare to have a westerly wind window to go to the Tuamotu islands, we made sure to be ready to set sail on Monday morning. It only took us a couple of hours to get the boat ready and stock up a few additional supplies at the local supermarket. We helped another sailing boat called Kenavo (whom we met in Maupihaa) to refuel before also heading to Tikehau. Wallis left the Huahine lagoon at 10am.

The first day was a lot of fun, we took out the light front sail (gennaker) in 15kt of wind and broke our top speed record with 8.6kt on our GPS display. We then slowed down as it is a bit risky to keep our gennaker out after sunset in case an unexpected storm decides to show up, and kept going at 5kt through the night on a direct course to our destination. With less wind on the second day, we put the gennaker back on and we’re pushed along at 3kt, which was good timing for an arrival the following day in the morning. We put the engine on overnight as the wind completely dropped and entered a very peaceful Tikehau lagoon just after sunrise. Our best sail ever !

Tikehau and Tuamotus

Another first - first time we sail to the Tuamotus archipelago with Wallis! Hopefully by now you are familiar with French Polynesian geography and realise that till now we stuck to sailing in Society Islands archipelago. The Tuamotus are different, consisting of 78 atolls, some inhabited and yet many to discover by boat.

You can have different sailing experiences, our preference is to stay longer in a place even if it means we cannot visit all the atolls. We decided to take our time to soak in the beauty of Tikehau..

Tikehau is one of the first atolls in the North West Tuamotus, with about 400 people living in a village in the south called Tuherahera. We think that most of them work for the one fancy resort on the atoll -either as staff or activities related to tourism. Tuherahera is so cute - quiet, clean, beautiful and sleepy! There are a couple of local restaurants (snacks), churches, and the beaches have shells and beautiful violet sea urchin spikes to collect! We ran around the island - a 9km circular path and also walked along the reef, trying to imagine how the atoll looked millions of years ago.

Even though atolls have water inside and outside, they get fresh water only from the rains. Houses have tanks to collect rain water (see photo). Almost no vegetables or fruit grow in the atolls as they lack earth and people in the Tuamotus need to wait for boats with supplies to arrive from main islands. The day we arrived was also the monthly arrival of the supplies and we witnessed the village gathering to pick up their orders. The place to be!

The water dilemma

Our boat is an Allure 39.9 and is designed for “blue ocean” cruising, which means sailing around the world. A key quality required for such a program is autonomy, so we can spend weeks sailing before needing to stop for “refuelling”. Engine propulsion is not an issue as we mainly use our sails to get around, the 400L tank allows us to carry enough diesel for months. It is the same for electricity on board as we have just upgraded our batteries to a brand new lithium setup which we can recharge with solar, wind and (if really needed) running our main engine. Wallis also has plenty of storage for us to carry enough daal, rice and masala to make kichdi for years.

Our main challenge is water. Refuelling water typically includes filling up our 350L fresh water tank and carrying around 60 1.5L bottles of drinkable water, which typically lasts for 1 month (with only the 2 of us on board). Here is the dilemma… Option 1 is to stick to the current setup, which requires us to manage our water reserves carefully and be ready to spend some days carrying water cans back and forth to our boat. We are also experimenting with rain water catching solutions, but this is a story for another time. Option 2 is to invest in a water maker system, which converts sea water into fresh water so we can fill up our tank while at sea. Having unlimited water sounds ideal of course, but it comes with a few downsides: the process requires energy and therefore engine time, and it is also quite complex and expensive to maintain. We are seriously considering the water maker option and will have to decide before we leave French Polynesia to explore other parts of the Pacific Ocean and South East Asia… Stay tuned.