After a quick look round Papeete, we sailed for Moorea, where they spend much of their holiday. This was my favourite island, spectacularly beautiful, with good anchorages. We went for several walks enjoying all the flowers and admiring the astonishing, pinnacled peaks: all that’s left of ancient volcanoes, the hard core remaining while the softer rock has weathered away. Cook’s Bay was breathtakingly lovely, certainly one experience that all voyaging sailors should have.
It was lovely getting to know Joan and Michael better and they survived the experience of living aboard very well. Their last couple of days were marred by bad weather and torrential rain: indeed, during a lot of our time in the Pacific we had indifferent weather. The Trade Wind zones appear much less predictable than in the Atlantic. After they left, we sailed back to Moorea and then on to Huahine, much less touristy than the previous two. We visited Tahaa, briefly and then went on to Bora Bora. This has a reputation for being incredibly beautiful, but while it looks lovely from the distance, close to we found it less appealing. I suspect that its reputation comes from the first view that visitors have from an aeroplane: a shallow lagoon surrounds it, which is bright turquoise from the air. In combination with its dramatic peaks and white beaches, it must be a glorious sight.
Trevor and I were both impatient to move on to somewhere more ‘real’ – an impatience that I suspect meant we had less pleasure out of French Polynesia than might otherwise have been the case, so on 21 August, we headed off towards Suvarov in the Cook Islands, an island as different from those in the Society group as can be imagined.