Passage to Moorea - Haapiti

[Kyle]Getting from Tahiti to Moorea ended up being a bit more arduous than expected. We had no wind at all to start, but still had to deal with short 3m seas wrapping around Tahiti, which slowed us to a crawl.

Halfway across, we left the lee of Tahiti and all of a sudden we were in thirty knots of wind. Great! Shut down the engine, unroll a little bit of jib and zoom!

The seas then built to four meters, which, according to our current logbook, are the largest we have seen since we started it eleven months ago. They were still not big enough to be a concern, except that we were about to try to enter a narrow pass and it was hard to see over them to tell if the surf had closed the entrance. We had to get pretty close to it to tell it was safe to go in.

Once inside, the waves stopped, but there was so much headwind, we could only make 2 ½ knots against it. We found a perfect little spot on the sand shelf on the edge of the reef and dropped anchor.

Ahh - anchored in beautiful, bommie free sand

Our first anchorage in Moorea was on the less popular southwest side. We deliberately picked it as a quiet break from Papeete. We were back to being where there’s no stores and only a couple of houses on the beach. We needed a day of having no long list of things to do. The water was that color you can’t help but want to jump into and the view of the spires topping the island takes our breaths away every time we look at it. We can even see a little bit of Tahiti just past the headland.

Clear waters, clear skies - perfect!