Commodore
May 21, 2023

Sunday 21 May – back to Tiputa, the main town on Rangiroa

I meant to include the map on yesterday’s blog to show the layout of the lagoon, the red cross shows where PolePole was anchored. You can only anchor here in extremely calm weather, the main anchorage for here is about 2 miles away. We didn’t want to risk another night here and we have explored everywhere we wanted to. There was not a breath of air, the wind speed clock showed zero knots which we’ve never knowingly seen before. This made it perfect for picking up the anchor with all its buoys attached. We had to go right over the anchor to drag it out from the dead coral, and it came up like a dream. We motored back to town and Rowan kept a beady eye out for bommies, although there is a passage marked on the charts, there are loads of shallow areas to navigate. We crawled along in full sunshine which without any wind was extremely hot.

Back in town we anchored near our previous spot, the place is so full of coral heads, it took us a couple of attempts to get a good spot, without getting too close to any other boats. We discovered we were near a Swiss boat called Ostrika who was the only boat at an anchorage in Raroia before we and a few Arc boats arrived, we rightly guessed their hearts sank at us arriving and disturbing their isolated spot. They were also next to us in South Fakarava and we invited them to our beach bbq which he came to on his own. Anyway they came over to see if we wanted to join them for lunch in town which we did. Not much open on a Sunday but we managed to find a place serving food and landed up having reasonable tuna tartare and salad, just before they closed. Turns out Swiss Patrick’s partner is an Italian Oncologist who used to work in Sicily. They are heading back for a year to earn a bit more money and visit elderly parents, she now does does A&E consulting so can always walk into a job. Patrick has retired and having done one circumnavigation was going to give up sailing, but she persuaded him to keep the boat and take her around the world!

We spent the rest of the afternoon back on PolePole baking in the heat. Having had very little socialising we suddenly had two outings in a day. Our friends the Kirbys in Wimbledon had told Rowan about their neighbour’s friend who was also crossing the Pacific and was in the Tuamotus. Rowan had contacted them as they happened to be here in Rangiroa too, we made plans to go out for dinner together. The restaurant they had booked was closed so we landed up going to the resort hotel for a drink, sadly we had missed bar snacks and the restaurant was full, so we just had drinks on the deck over the water with sharks drifting underneath us. Glen couldn’t believe it when we said we lived outside Bungay, turned out he had lived down the road from us in The Saints, with his first wife for 7 years. He was in the oil business and worked in Great Yarmouth. His new wife is Romanian and was very funny, warning us in advance that she is very blunt. She had a rant about Nakedwines that they had come across in America. Very funny, Rowan just ignored it and didn’t rise to the bait at all. Poor thing has been sailing since 2016, she gets chronically sea sick, has become allergic to the sun and can’t stand sailing anymore, so they have to sell the boat! Poor Glen I suspect he has a lot more sailing in him, he is an engineer, and clearly loves tinkering with their boat called Cloudy Bay. We had a good laugh over a couple of cocktails and got back on board PolePole at 10pm without any supper!