To get to Huahine from Tahiti, we needed to do an overnight sail. It went pretty smoothly. We sailed on the windward side of Moorea, which kept us from having any drama with calms in the lee or waves wrapping around the island to slam into each other. The wind was far enough astern that we didn't even need to bother unbagging our mainsail, opting instead to alternate between the jib and the spinnaker, depending on wind strength.
Departing Tahiti, and passing Morea with its distinctive peaks
We entered Passe Farearea, on the eastern side of Huahine without issue. Then it was a bit of a meandering path to the anchorage near the village of Tefarerii. The rumor was that there may be four moorings available there for pickup.
Regulations in French Polynesia are in a state of flux right now. During the Covid pandemic, both the public and the government got weary of all the boats that got stuck here when borders were locked down. This growing anti-boater sentiment caused the government to come up with a whole slew of anchoring prohibitions designed to make all the boats magically disappear to somewhere else. They needed to leave some capacity for local charterers and a few visitors, so they decided to prohibit anchoring on popular islands, of which Huahine is one, and install a fixed number of government moorings to keep the number of boats below a certain level. These moorings have time limits, must be reserved in advance, and be paid for online. They do, at least, protect the coral from careless anchoring, and require less effort to pick up and cast off than deploying heavy ground tackle does. Communities, and especially high-end resorts, embraced the idea because the boats would now be out of their backyards and over in the boonies, where nobody wants to be. It's basically the same logic that decided where to put the Indian Reservations in the United States.
When borders started reopening and the acute part of the pandemic started to wane, stranded boats continued on their way, thinning out the anchorages. The impetus for the new system started to fizzle. What remains now is a hodge-podge system that is only partially complete. There is a set of prohibitions against having a boat anywhere not in newly defined designated mooring areas, except when underway. Most of the actual moorings, however, as well as the websites for reserving and paying for the moorings, have only been partially installed, leaving spotty coverage at best. The 'best' moorings for us made it nearly impossible to enjoy a shore excursion in Huahine, so we were grateful that we'd been before (in 2017 and in 2018) and managed to explore so much during those visits.
That's why we weren't sure what we were going to find when we arrived in Huahine. We had tried to reserve a mooring using the new online booking system, but the link for making the reservation sent us in a circle back to the home page, and the system for paying did not seem to exist yet. We did manage to send an email with our request (and get a reply) so we were sure we had a reservation but were not quite sure for what, sinch we had also heard rumors that some or all the moorings there may have been either damaged or removed, and may or may not have been maintained, or possibly not installed yet. Also, there were no locations for the moorings, other than a general area delineated on a poor-quality map.
Coming within view of the anchorage, we found two other vessels there, each of which seemed to be on a mooring. We couldn't see anything that looked like any more. Maryanne eventually spotted something pretty near one of the other boats, so we started easing that direction, while keeping an eye on the alarmingly decreasing depth. Only when we were about two boat lengths away did it become apparent that we were not heading for another mooring, but were instead aiming for what may have been a marker for a local's fishing or lobstering spot, which was in shin-deep water. We managed to put Begonia into reverse and back away before we hit anything. Irritatingly, the people on the nearby boat, which was within easy hailing distance at conversational volume, did nothing but give us country-cow stares the whole time as they waited for the crunch. Thanks so much for the heads-up, a-holes!
Maryanne then spotted the other two moorings, which are separated from the first two by a pretty big gap. That's great! We'll be over there, you stay here.
Since the moorings were nowhere where anything useful could be reached without a fast dinghy and plenty of fuel, we decided to content ourselves splitting our time between hanging aboard and snorkeling the adjacent reef. The reef is actually very large, so it was easy to turn each excursion into all-day swims. For the last of these, we got it in our heads that we really wanted to see a deep hole between Begonia and the outer edge of the reef. The intervening reef was too shallow to swim over, so it was necessary to take a much longer, circuitous route to get there, that was maybe four times the straight-line distance. The hole turned out to be not as spectacular as we had hoped, just more of the same stuff, only deeper, but factoring in the currents, we did get to finish our day feeling like we had done something energetic.
We didn't go ashore at all, the current mooring field status makes that all very much more complicated than on our prior visits, but we did get out and snorkel a lot.
Kyle climbed the mast to fix our wind speed indicator - the plastic screw fitting at the end of the arm had developed a crack and for now we've 'fixed' it wtih a hose clamp so it can't completely fail (another item for the repair list once we reach New Zealand). Kyle snapped a picture of the bay from the top; you can see how far apart the moorings are.
Mooring location >> On google maps
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