Exploring French Polynesia; Changing Course While Sailing to the Island of Tahaa on a 30ft Sloop.

Hello friends, my name is James and this is my 1965 Albert 30 Sloop Tritea. We are on a mission to sail around the world and see as much of this beautiful planet as possible. We are currently working our way through the South Pacific and I can't wait to show you everything we see. Okay it's time to haul up here from Uturoa, the name of this village. Let me double check that's the name of this village. Yes, yes I was correct. It's time to haul up here from Uturoa village and we are bound for the island of Taha which resides in the same lagoon as Raiatea so we don't have to go out in the open ocean. We have an eight mile passage this morning to another very deep cove that looks awesome. The cove is Ha'ahmini or Bay Mahi, Bay Ha'ahmini. I think that's how you say it and it looks awesome. So it is very, very breezy out. It's just the trade winds, there's no nothing happening. This is just a very exposed anchorage and the trades have been pretty slack for like the last week but now they're just doing their regular thing. But just be a little tricky to haul up. I haul up by hand. I have a manual windlass but it's kind of more of a pain than just hauling up hand over hand. I only use it when it's really difficult which I'll probably will have to today. The trick is I can't just like motor crazy forward and haul it up. If I had someone on the boat with me I would have them motor slowly and do hand signals for them to stop because the issue is we are about, I don't know, 50 feet from three feet of water. So we kind of have to inch forward because the hook is dropped in like 19 feet of water and we're sitting over about 50 feet of water. Luckily the wind is blowing us away from the reef so even once we get it pulled up the wind's gonna blow the boat into deeper water until I get it secured and then we can drive on and there's no obstacles and like almost no traffic around the zone so it's always a little tricky managing this stuff solo. But the elements are with us. I'm gonna get the engine warmed up and then we're gonna haul up and move on. I'm excited to see Taha and check out the new anchorage. Here's Sand Dollar, awesome American cruisers. Very snotty passage. We're kind of heading almost dead into the wind. I think it's blowing 17 knots maybe 20 and we're coming up to like a narrow spot. I'll probably have to furl in the headsail but then with the motor I don't know if we can even do one knot so we'll see. There's a big catch ahead of us that's having just as much of a problem as we are so it's not just us we're doing like two knots right now. Change of plans. Completely impossible for us to make way into this wind. We've been doing less than a knot just sitting still and getting blown closer and closer to shore for the last like 20 minutes. So we're gonna go on the lee of the island and try to find an anchorage. It's wild out here. I don't even know well there's coral gardens which is around that way but I don't know how protected it is. We shall see. Definitely can't make it that way and we haven't even got to the narrowest part of the path so we can't even like tack. The bigger boat ahead of us put their sails away and they obviously have a bigger engine and they just like jumped forward but we're at high of rpm as we can we're at 2500 rpms and I'm not going to push the engine harder than that so and we're still quite a distance we're still five miles from that anchorage so there's no way. So we'll run for a different spot that's sailing's all about being flexible. We're passing a large mooring field if you're ever over this way sailing at Bay Apu. Seems chill. I think you could anchor up in that bay as well. It seemed doable. There's two different fingers of this bay. I thought about anchoring in the second one but we're going to cruise on up. There's a deeper bay that's in line with the mouth of the pass and it's only five miles away so we're going to go there and then that puts us in a good spot to move to coral gardens in a day or so. We are bound for Hurupiti Bay and should be good anchoring. There might be mooring balls. Cool view of Rayatea and the crazy emerald green lagoon. What a difference it is being in the lee of Taha. That wind blowing on the other side. You can see Bora Bora in the distance. We'll be going there in a few days. I can already see inside the bay that the water is disturbed from the wind so we'll see we might have to duck out of this bay and go somewhere else but a lot of white caps on the water in the bay so if it's too windy in there then obviously we'll go somewhere else. So there's three boats in the anchorage. Two of them, one of them I can see on AS. He's sitting over pretty deep water. I'm going to go forward of them, kind of poke around, look at the depths. There's supposed to be some shallow depths and I'm guessing that there's a river that feeds this in so it's probably mud holding but the wind is doable for sure. Let's get up in here and see if we can find a spot. Super stoked to find an empty mooring. That's my first time picking up a mooring here in French Polynesia and only maybe the third time I've ever picked up a mooring solo and I've never had to pick it up in high winds. It went pretty well. I think I'd make two passes but I'm happy. Happy, happy to be on the mooring. It looked very stout. I have two lines attached to it so that you don't get the sawing motion even though this has a plastic guard and everything it's better to have two lines on the mooring. So now it's time to chill out, make some lunch and relax. So a very polite gentleman just came over and told me this is a private mooring ball for Vanilla Tours. I don't know how you're supposed to tell what's private and what's not because they all seem to be the same color here but it's okay. We're gonna haul up. It's high winds right now. Haul up and try to get in and anchor in this bay in these winds but we'll get it done. All right we are anchored. Not crazy about this spot and we will for sure only stay one night. There's like a very shallow reef there and a very shallow reef there and I got caught up in that reef when I anchored because the wind blew us over the reef as I was anchoring. We didn't hit bottom but the chain got wrapped up. It took me forever to drive the boat to get it to untangle. This is supposed to be mud. That's what the gentleman, the French gentleman that asked me to leave that mooring told me this was all mud. We're anchored in 40 feet. We have four scope out. Not crazy about it. But with this wind there's not a lot of options so we're just gonna stay here tonight and move in the morning. It's a pretty spot. Very beautiful sunset. The winds are totally gone. Very peaceful in the bay now which is nice. Hoping for a nice quiet night and then we'll haul up in the morning and move on. Really beautiful view though. We are hauled up and heading for Coral Gardens. It's a beautiful morning. It's a stunning sunrise. I came very very close to running aground on a giant like charted coral standing forward filming that last clip for you guys. Such an idiot move but I managed to get by with only four feet under the keel. So stupid. But it's beautiful. We have just a four mile hop north of here and gonna anchor what's called Coral Gardens. There's a hoa that goes between two motus. I guess one of the motus has a big resort on it and it's supposed to be a fantastic drift sort of snorkel with unbelievable life in the water. So we're gonna go find out about it. Hopefully find ourselves a really good spot on the reef shelf to anchor. And if it stays calm like this we'll stay there a couple days. Very peaceful night on the hook. The winds died off in the afternoon and never came back which is good. It was very protected, very relaxed, and very calm. It's time for me to get back to the chartplotter or the Navionics iPad. Make sure we don't hit any reefs. More bar in the distance. The whole South Pacific flows behind. We are approaching the Coral Gardens anchorage. I think it's going to get real crowded. I bet in the daytime it gets real crowded. I've already seen two boats pull up as I've been approaching and drop their hooks. So hopefully we can get in before the crowds. Here's the resort. Someone's anchored like really close to the resort which is like if you come to South Pacific don't anchor in front of resort. That's how you piss off the locals and the local business owners and all that stuff. It's just there's plenty of places to anchor. You don't need to anchor directly in front of their little like bungalows. And we are anchored at Coral Gardens. We're anchored in 20 feet of water. We have five scope out and it's stunningly beautiful. Right in there between those two motus is where the Coral Gardens HOA is. That's supposed to be beautiful snorkeling and we're going to explore that later today. But now it's time for second breakfast. If you enjoy the content on this channel and would like to contribute you can consider joining the Patreon crew. Thanks for watching. Fair winds until next time.